“If you calculate how much [the US’] well-known missile defenses cost them, one of the main components for overcoming these missile defenses that we have is the Avangard, an intercontinental missile with an intercontinental-range glide unit. So you cannot compare budgets. We’ve basically nullified everything they’ve done, everything they’ve invested in this missile defense system,” Putin told Dmitry Kiselev, director of Sputnik parent media group Rossiaya Segodnya, remarking on the immense largesse and waste in the US defense industry.
What is the Avangard?
“The Avangard is practically covered with plasma [during flight, ed.] and the plasma absorbs electromagnetic rays, thus making the hypersonic vehicle invisible to radar. As a result of high kinetic energy, the Avangard can destroy targets without the use of nuclear weapons. This is a unique tool, and to date no other country in the world has created anything like it,” military historian, defense commentator, and missile and air defense specialist Yuri Knutov recently told Sputnik.
“America’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 forced Russia to start developing hypersonic weapons,” Putin recalled in his conversation with Efremov. “We had to create these weapons in response to the deployment of the US strategic missile defense system, which would have been able to neutralize and render obsolete our entire nuclear potential [...] For the first time in modern Russia’s history, the country possesses the most modern types of weapons, which are far superior in terms of their force, power, speed and, very importantly, in terms of accuracy compared to all which existed before them and exist today,” Putin said.