When the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty died in 2019, Moscow promised that it would not place missiles facing NATO that had previously been banned under the treaty, unless NATO placed such weapons in Europe facing Russia. The TASS press review of yesterday cites the daily Kommersant as reporting that a U.S. ground launcher capable of firing SM-6 missiles was brought to the Danish island of Bornholm for a U.S.-Danish joint exercise that ended on Sept. 25. Not mentioned in the TASS review is that the launcher at issue, called the Mid-Range Capability battery that is being developed for the U.S. Army using U.S. Navy missiles, will also be capable of firing the Tomahawk cruise missile. The SM-6, which is normally a U.S. Navy surface-to-air missile but can be used in a land attack mode, has an advertised range of 240 km, too short to even reach Kaliningrad from Bornholm, but the Tomahawk can easily reach Moscow, some 1,400 km to the east.
The implications of the Bornholm deployment should be clear. The joint U.S.-Danish exercise using this launcher “may raise the question of the so-called moratorium on the deployment of similar Russian weapons systems to the region,” Dmitry Stefanovich, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told Kommersant. “I believe that at this stage, formal inquiries will be sent via diplomatic channels, but its seems appropriate to strengthen Russia’s position by an open or ‘leaked’ move to test the weapons that Russia announced following the United States’ withdrawal from the INF Treaty, including the land-based version of the Kalibr cruise missile and an intermediate-range hypersonic missile,” he added.
Stefanovich remarks that there are no reports of the 9M729 missile being used in Ukraine. The 9M729, part of the Iskander system, served as the pretext for the U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty. “Meanwhile, reports have surfaced in the media, citing anonymous sources, which concerned the land-based version of the Tsirkon hypersonic missile and a weapon called Zmeyevik, which fits the description of a ground-based intermediate-range hypersonic missile system exactly,” Stefanovich noted.
