Three minutes and 33 seconds. That’s how long state-owned television channel Rossiya 1 claims it would take a nuclear missile to reach Paris from Kaliningrad, a Russian territorial enclave between Poland and Lithuania.
The propaganda channel showed how many seconds it would take a nuclear Sarmat-missile, one of the latest additions to Russia’s nuclear arsenal, to reach different European capitals. London: 202 seconds, Paris: 200 seconds, Berlin: 106 seconds.
An infographic shows arrows pointing from Kaliningrad to the cities, indicating the length of the hypothetical journey. “Look at this image, count the seconds… It’s already there!” Presenter Olga Skabeïeva boasts with what would appear to be excitement. “One Sarmat missile and it’s done: no more UK.”
The simulation was shown on ‘60 Minutes’, Russia’s most-watched political talk show. Among the guests was MP Aleksey Zhuravlyov, chair of the extremist pro-Putin party Rodina, enthusiastically speaking about the possibility of deploying Sarmat missiles from Kaliningrad against Europe.
The channel is widely watched in Russia and has the country’s second-largest audience, to which it promotes the views, perceptions and agendas of the Russian government. One of the channel’s commentators has even gone as far as shouting there will be a nuclear war.
‘Pure fiction’
Russia does indeed have the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles that were discussed in the TV broadcast, which are currently the most powerful of its sort in existence. The missiles are based in Kaliningrad and fly three kilometres per second.
But that those missiles can reach European capitals in seconds or minutes is “pure fiction”, former colonel and military expert Roger Housen told Het Laatste Nieuws.
“It is a claim that has never been tested," he explains. "They did do launches, which were successful, but those missiles had no nuclear weapons attached, so the conditions were perfect.”
He says the claims are pure rhetoric, intended to deter and threaten the West. “It is scaremongering to manipulate Western public opinion. They want us to get scared and urge our policymakers not to hurt the Russians too much,” he said. “In fact, they just want the Western media to talk about this, then their goal has been achieved," says Housen.
“The Kremlin’s doctrine is still the same: nuclear weapons are only used when Russia itself is attacked by an external aggressor or when the survival of the Moscow regime is directly threatened. Neither is currently the case.”
