“Recall that there was the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty that was signed. It came into effect with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev back in December of 1987,” Johnson tells Sputnik. “And that treaty dealt with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, missile launchers with a range of 500 to 1000km, ie short-medium range and 1000 to 5500 are called intermediate range.”
According to him, the recent missile strike against the city of Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine was President Putin’s way of sending a message to the West and to the United States who earlier “unilaterally abrogated” the INF Treaty.
“The fact that the United States unilaterally abrogated this treaty, I think Vladimir Putin was putting the United States and the West on notice, ‘okay, you abrogated that treaty. Now, let us show you what we have’,” Johnson elaborates.
The aforementioned strike on Dnepropetrovsk, he says, shows that Russia “developed both a short-medium range and an intermediate range ballistic missile with MIRV capability, which refers to multiple independent reentry vehicles so that one missile can carry a warhead with multiple warheads that can disperse.”
“What makes this particularly interesting is this is a hypersonic so this travels at a speed that no Western air defense system is capable of stopping,” Johnson adds. “So Vladimir Putin in destroying this one defense facility in Dnepropetrovsk was sending a very clear message to the West that more will follow. We'll see if the West backs down now or not.”