Despite the fact that russia planned on the night of Monday, May 19, to carry out a "training and combat" launch of the RS-24 Yars intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), currently everything indicates that this launch of the missile, which is a weighty "argument" of the Kremlin in its confrontation with the West, could not take place – for reasons unknown at this time.
Let us recall that according to the Defense Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense, the launch area for the launch of this missile was the most atypical – in the Sverdlovsk region, near the settlement of Svobodny. It is there that the 433rd regiment of the 42nd division of the 31st army of the russian Strategic Missile Forces is based. This launch area is located just 25 km from Nizhny Tagil (a city in Sverdlovsk Oblast).
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Given such a close distance to the city with a population of about 350 thousand, any launch would have been filmed by local residents with a huge probability. After such a launch, the network would be flooded with relevant photos, such as those below:
The russians would also have the opportunity to observe the flight of the missile on its rout.
Given that the main russian test site for ICBMs is Kura in Kamchatka, the flight of this missile should have been observed over a large area of Siberia as well as the Far East from Khanty-Mansiysk (a city in west-central russia) to Magadan (the administrative centre of Magadan Oblast, russia). But no video of another flight of the russian RS-24 Yars ICBM has been published so far.
Why the russians did not launch this time remains unknown. After all, in 2023, the russians failed to successfully launch the RS-24 Yars ICBM twice in a row – they went off course. After all, any missile undergoes a pre-flight check, during which some shortcomings could be identified that could prevent the decision to launch the missile this time. It should be remembered that at the moment, before the negotiations between Putin and Trump, which were announced the day before, the Kremlin is unlikely to be interested in showing the incapacity of its so-called Strategic Nuclear Forces.
It is also not possible to exclude the possibility of an emergency situation during the first stage of the flight immediately after launch. Despite the fact that the RS-24 Yars ICBM is a deep modernization of the RT-2PM2 Topol-M ICBM (NATO reporting name: SS-27 Sickle B, other designations: SS-27 Mod 1, RS-12M1, RS-12M2), there is always a risk of failure of some components and systems of the missile.
We will also recall that at the end of September 2024, the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM (NATO reporting name: SS-X-29 or SS-X-30) exploded in the launch chamber at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the russian federation.
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