Free Republic

Three of Vladimir Putin’s top hypersonic scientists have been detained on suspicion of high treason – after Ukraine claimed to have shot down a volley of ‘undefeatable’ missiles. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the eminent academics, Anatoly Maslov, Alexander Shiplyuk and Valery Zvegintsev, all face ‘very serious accusations’. The trio have all worked on the weapons for years and were among the authors of a book chapter entitled ‘Hypersonic Short-Duration Facilities for Aerodynamic Research at ITAM, Russia’. Putin has long boasted that Russia is the global leader in hypersonic missiles and unveiled his ‘Kinzhal’ rockets in 2018, hailing them as...

Russia has deployed aircraft armed with hypersonic missiles along the Baltic Sea, a move that inches the country's forces closer to its NATO border, The Associated Press reported. In a Thursday announcement, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed that it moved three MiG-31 fighters brandishing Kinzhal missiles to Chkalovsk air base in Kaliningrad — a Russian enclave north of Poland and south of Lithuania. Moscow asserts that the Kinzhal missiles, which have already been used in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, have a range of up to roughly 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) and fly at ten times the speed of sound.

President Biden on Monday confirmed that Russia launched a hypersonic missile in Ukraine over the weekend and said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s may launch cyberattacks against the US and use chemical weapons in Ukraine next because his “back is against the wall.” Biden said Ukraine’s military is “wreaking havoc on the Russian military,” making Putin increasingly desperate in his nearly month-old invasion of Ukraine. “The more his back is against the wall, the greater the severity of the tactics he may employ,” Biden warned at a Business Roundtable event

Russia's claim that it launched a hypersonic missile against a military depot in Ukraine has drawn skepticism from Western defense sources who say the alleged strike came from a 1980s-era system that likely did not hit the presumed target. Russia announced on Saturday that it fired its much-vaunted hypersonic Kinzhal missile for the first time in a war setting, demolishing a Ukrainian underground arms warehouse in the country's western sector. The report prompted commentators to note that the attack, if true, in part demonstrated that the U.S. has not kept pace with Russian hypersonic technology. But the Kinzhal is "nothing...