Russia uses new generation laser weapons in Ukraine

Russia announced today that it is using a new generation of powerful laser weapons to burn drones, developing some of Moscow’s secret weapons to counter a plethora of Western weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018 had introduced a series of new weapons that included a new intercontinental ballistic missile, submarine drones, a supersonic weapon and a new laser weapon.

Little is known about the characteristics of the new laser weapon. Putin had mentioned a man named Peresvet, who took his name from a medieval orthodox warrior monk, Alexander Peresvet, who was killed in battle.

Yuri Borisov, the deputy prime minister in charge of military development, told a conference in Moscow that the Peresvet had already been widely deployed and could blind satellites up to 1,500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.

He said, however, that there were already other more powerful Russian weapons systems than the Peresvet that could fire unmanned aircraft and other equipment. Borisov referred to a test carried out yesterday Tuesday in which the Peresvet burned an unmanned aircraft at a distance of 5 kilometers in five seconds.

“If the Peresvet goes blind, the new generation of laser weapons achieves the natural destruction of the target, the thermal destruction, they burn it,” Borisov said, speaking on Russian state television.

Asked if these weapons were used in Ukraine, Borisov said: “Yes, the first prototypes have already been used there” and are called Zadira.

Almost nothing has been made public about Zadira, but in 2017 the Russian media reported that state-owned nuclear power company Rosatom had helped develop a weapons-based physics program known to the Russians as ONFP.

Putin’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine showed the limited capabilities of the post-Soviet conventional military forces, although he said the “special military operation” was proceeding according to plan and would achieve all the goals set by Moscow.

The United States does not send its own military or NATO forces to Ukraine, but Washington and its allies supply Kyiv with billions of dollars worth of weapons, including drones, heavy mortars, anti-aircraft guns and anti-aircraft guns.

Putin sees these large arms shipments as part of a larger US plan aimed at destroying Russia, promising that this will never be achieved.

Borisov’s comments show that Russia has made significant progress with laser weapons, a trend that is of major interest to other nuclear powers such as the United States and China.

The use of lasers to blind satellites, or even burn them, was once a sci-fi experience, but major powers such as the United States, China, and Russia have been working on variants of such weapons for years.

In addition to the benefits of conventional warfare from burning unmanned aerial vehicles, the blinding of reconnaissance systems also has a strategic impact, as satellites are used to monitor intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear weapons.

Borisov said he had just returned from Sarov, a closed city in the Nizhny Novgorod region that was once known as Arzamas-16 because it was so secretive, as it is Russia’s nuclear weapons research center.

He also said that a new generation of laser weapons using a wide electromagnetic band will eventually replace conventional weapons.

“This is not some kind of exotic idea, this is the reality,” Borisov said.

Source: ANOE