MOSCOW, June 24. /TASS/. No deliveries from abroad are needed for creating the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), so sanctions imposed on Russia’s defense industry will not affect it in any form, Chief Designer of the Makeev Missile Center Vladimir Degtyar has told TASS.
"The creation of our missile does not depend on shipments from abroad, everything is manufactured by Russian enterprises. Sarmat is a fully Russian missile. Its design and production involves cooperation among Russian industrial enterprises, with the use of most advanced domestic technologies and materials. The sanctions that have been imposed will have no effect on the process," he said.
In Degtyar’s words, over 100 enterprises from various parts of Russia were engaged in the project to build the missile, which he described as "the crown of the missile engineering."
"Many production processes needed to be launched and conducted in sync. That is why the most important task was to build cooperation between developers, manufacturers and testing enterprises. This means that more than a hundred of companies all over the country had to work as a single well-oiled mechanism," he said.
RS-28 Sarmat ICBM, developed by the Makeev Missile Center, is due to replace the R-36M2 Voevoda ICBM that has been operational with Russia’s Strategic Missile Force since 1988. The missile will be able to hit targets at virtually unlimited ranges in comparison with the Voevoda missile. Having the biggest flight range of 18,000 km, Sarmat can fly both over the North and South poles, which makes the US missile defense system ineffective as it is tuned to intercept missiles flying only over the North Pole. The advanced missile can fly in the Earth’s atmosphere and perform high-altitude maneuvering.
According to earlier reports, Sarmat is able to carry from 10 to 15 warheads, including Avangard hypersonic gliding warheads that have a speed of up to 27 Mach.