Ukraine launched a medium-range missile, the FP-5 Flamingo, over 1,300 km, hitting Russia’s key Votkinsk Machine Building Plant overnight (Feb. 20-21). The 1,000-kg warhead hit, according to Scott Ritter’s report, “a critical electroplating and stamping workshop” where “Russian technicians carry out the metal stamping and forming processes related to the manufacture of missile body elements, as well as the galvanic processing of parts, including the application of protective and functional coatings and surface preparation for further assembly.” The Votkinsk facility works on “strategically important missiles such as the Topol-M and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile. The Iskander and Oreshnik missiles” are also manufactured there. A fire broke out in the particular workshop and 11 workers were reported injured.
Ritter provided a succinct statement of the problem: “A missile designed by the British using indigenous Ukrainian parts and manufacturing infrastructure known as the FP-5 Flamingo” is the problem. “The FP-5 Flamingo is exactly what it portends to be—a British-made weapon designed to get around the legalities, and consequences, of Russian red lines regarding the use of long-range missiles based in Ukraine against Russia targets.” Translation: “Votkinsk is the heart and soul of Russia’s strategic defense industry. And now it has been attacked by a British-designed weapon using intelligence provided by the CIA. This attack is as close to an act of war by both the United States and the United Kingdom as one can imagine.”
It is not lost on Moscow that the attempted assault on a residence of Putin, less than two months ago, and this transparent U.K. targeting of Russia’s strategic missiles (shortly after the U.S. walked away from the last nuclear arms control treaty), fits in with a gigantic game of nuclear chicken. In 2023, Sergei Karaganov, the head of Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, warned “about the use of Ukraine as a dagger to wound Russia on behalf of the collective West,” and nothing short of some tactical nuclear weapons hitting Kiev’s sponsors in Europe would put an end to such a dangerous game. At the time, Putin rightly rejected this line of thinking as hazardous, arguing that there are options available to Russia other than escalating up the MAD ladder—yet, Ritter raises the terrifying point that the persistent (and insane) nuclear gamesmanship of the West has provided grist for the mill of the Karaganov outlook inside Russia.
