Good news everyone! Remember how everyone was pissed at Russia, mostly for invading Ukraine, but also for a lot of other reasons? Russia just told everyone to BACK. OFF. in the most wonderfully diplomatic way possible – by test-firing an intercontinental ballistic missile.
You know intercontinental ballistic missiles. They're the doomsday ones. The apocalyptic ones. The ones that everyone sees launching before the end. The ones that herald the Messiah with their 7000-mile range and their 800-kiloton warheads.
They're the fun ones.
Russia's mobile SS-25 Sickle was launched from the southern Astrakhan region, near the Caspian Sea, according to wire reports, and the dummy warhead it carried landed many miles away at a test range in Kazakhstan.
News of the launch came right after Russian President Vladimir Putin finished giving an hour-long unscripted speech where he decried the removal of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as an "unconstitutional coup," and where he again claimed that Russian troops had not entered the Crimea, despite everyone already seeing this, this, and this, and that Ukraine protestors were not actually protestors, but rather an "orgy of radicals and nationalists," which sounds like a good time.
Guy's certainly got a flair for the dramatic.
The United States was warned before the launch, in accordance with standing disarmament treaties, according to Reuters.
If you're curious as to what an SS-25 Sickle (AKA the RS-12M Topol) launch looks like, it's pretty much this:
Like I said, fun.
Photo credit: AP
Russia Just Test-Fired An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile