Putin Challenges US to Missile Duel

Vladimir Putin is considering a “missile duel” with the United States to show that Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic Oreshnik missile could defeat any American missile defence system.

The Russian president proposes that both sides choose a target that American missiles would protect. “We are ready for such an experiment,” the Russian president said today during his annual “question and answer session.”

Putin believes that Western countries do not realize how effective the Oreshnik ballistic missile is. On November 21, all the alarm bells went off in the West when Russia fired an Oreshnik without a nuclear warhead towards the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

That was Putin’s response to the first Ukrainian deployment of American ATACM missiles and British Stormshadows on Russian territory. Ukrainian forces attacked a Russian air base with ATACMs last week. Russian retaliation for this has yet to come.

According to Putin, the Oreshnik remains a modern weapon even though it is based on old Russian designs. Earlier in his speech, he mentioned that the Russian economy is stable despite a sky-high inflation rate of nine percent.