MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Russia test fires long-range missile

President Dmitry Medvedev oversaw the test firing of an intercontinental Topol missile on Sunday and vowed to commission new generation weapons for Russia's armed forces.
A Reuters reporter said the truck-mounted Topol was fired in drizzling rain from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, which is nestled among the taiga forests of Russia's north.
Half an hour later it hit the Kura testing site, 6000 kilometres away on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific.
"I have just been told that the dummy warhead has landed in Kura," Mr Medvedev said from the Topol launch pad where acrid smoke from the missile still hung thick in the air.

“The advanced Topol missile…has three cruise engines and can develop hypersonic speed. The high thrust-to-weight ratio allows the warhead to maneuver on the trajectory and pass through a dense air defense system.”

The RT-2UTTKh Topol-M (Russian: РТ-2УТТХ) is one of the most recent intercontinental ballistic missiles to be deployed by Russia and the first to be developed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In its Russian designation РТ stands for Raketa Tverdotoplivnaya ("solid fuel rocket")
It has been assigned the NATO reporting name STALIN/DIA: SS-27. "Topol"  in Russian means "poplar".