Russia has included a hypersonic missile system with a guided warhead Avangard in the scope of the Treaty on Measures to Further Reduce and Limit Strategic Offensive Arms III (START III), the Director of the Department for Nonproliferation and Arms Control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) told RIA Novosti ) countries Vladimir Ermakov.
“This was done in good faith, despite a number of legal issues arising, including with respect to the unconstructive US approaches to control over such systems. These issues have yet to be resolved. In general, we are open to discussing this issue in multilateral formats, ”the diplomat said.
In December, President Donald Trump's special envoy for arms control Marshall Billingsley called the US-Russia treaty a bad deal. “We are not interested in simply extending it (…). The treaty covered approximately 90 percent of US arsenals and only about 40 percent of Russian weapons, ”Billingsley said.
In December, a video appeared on the YouTube channel of the Russian Defense Ministry showing the loading of an Avangard rocket into a mine.
In the same month, the Zvezda TV channel published a video showing the appearance of Avangard.
For the first time, Russian President Vladimir Putin said about Avangard during his address to the Federal Assembly in March 2018. Then the Russian leader said that the winged warhead of the complex is capable of flying at a speed 20 times higher than the speed of sound and “goes to the target like a meteorite, like a ball of fire.”
