Russian warship with hypersonic weapons to join drills with China and South Africa

Asia-Pacific, Europe, News January 27, 2023 , by IRIA No Comments

Russia has announced that its warship would participate in joint exercises with the navies of China and South Africa next month. The Russian warship Admiral Gorshkov would be armed with new-generation hypersonic cruise weapons.

The Russian Defense Ministry statement said, “In February 2023, joint drills are expected to take place with the navies of the Republic of South Africa and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army off South African coasts.”

According to Russia’s state-owned media agency, “Admiral Gorshkov will go to the logistic support point in Syria’s Tartus, and then take part in joint naval exercises with the Chinese and South African navies.”

Admiral Gorshkov would be armed with Zircon missiles which Russia says fly at nine times the speed of sound and have a range of over 1,000 kilometers. Zircon missiles are the centerpiece of Russia’s hypersonic arsenal, along with the Avangard glide vehicle that entered combat duty in 2019.

Last week, the South African National Defense Force said that its naval forces plan to conduct drills from February 17 to February 27, 2023, near the port city of Durban and Richards Bay.

According to the statement, the exercises aim “to strengthen the already flourishing relations between South Africa, Russia, and China.” The exercise will be the second involving the three countries in South Africa, after a drill in 2019, the defense force added in its statement.

The Russian navy has been conducting frequent exercises involving its Admiral Gorshkov frigate and its hypersonic cruise missiles. At the start of this month, Gorshkov was sent to participate in a naval drill held in the Norwegian Sea, while one month before that, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent it to the Atlantic Ocean in a signal to the West that Russia would not back down over the war in Ukraine.

^{In this image taken from a video released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, a Zircon hypersonic cruise missile is launched by the frigate Admiral Gorshkov of the Russian navy from the Barents Sea. (Image Credit: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)}

On January 25, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that “The crew of the frigate Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Gorshkov, operating in the western part of the Atlantic Ocean, conducted an exercise on the use of hypersonic missile weapons by computer simulation… the frigate worked out the organization of the application of missile strike with a Zircon hypersonic missile at a sea target simulating a mock enemy ship and located at a distance of more than 900 km.”

China, Russia, and the United States are in a race to develop hypersonic weapons, seen as a way to gain an edge over any adversary because of their speeds, greater than five times that of sound, and because they are harder to detect. Russia sees its hypersonic weapons as a way to pierce increasingly sophisticated U.S. missile defenses that Putin has warned could one day shoot down its nuclear missiles.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned the United States that Russian hypersonic missiles would soon be close to NATO’s shores after the U.S. embassy said in a video it stood in solidarity with Russians who opposed the war in Ukraine. The main gift for the New Year with an ammunition package of Zircon.” Medvedev said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the most deadly wars in Europe since World War Two and the deepest crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.