Russia revealed on Wednesday (18) its use of laser weapons in the war against Ukraine. The equipment has been used to burn drones, implementing some of Moscow’s strategies to contain Western armaments supplied to Kyiv. The information is from the newspaper O Globo.
There is not much information about the specifics of war products. According to the deputy prime minister in charge of Russian military development, Yury Borisov, the tool is called “Zadira” and would be able to burn drones and objects.
“If Peresvet blinds, then the new generation of laser weapons leads to the physical destruction of the target. Thermal destruction, they burn,” he detailed on state television.
When asked if the equipment was being used in Ukraine, the official confirmed. “Yes. The prototypes are already being used there.”
According to the authority, Zadira is even more powerful than Peresvet — named after the medieval Orthodox warrior monk Alexander Peresvet, killed in combat — a weapon capable of blinding satellites up to 1,500 kilometers above Earth and already widely used by Russia, according to Borisov. However, the Deputy Prime Minister revealed that Moscow has systems even more powerful than Peresvet and that could cause thermal destruction of the target. On Tuesday (17), a test would have resulted in the burning of a drone from 5 kilometers away in five seconds.
Russian President Vladimir Putin even mentioned, in 2018, the development of a new laser weapon. The previous year, Russian media reported that Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom helped develop Zafira as part of a program to create new weapons-based physical principles, known by the Russian acronym ONFP.
USE OF LASER WEAPON
The development of such equipment would be of interest to other nuclear powers, such as the United States and China. According to Borisov, Russia has made significant progress in the area. In addition to being able to blind and burn drones and satellites, blinding reconnaissance systems also have a strategic impact, as the latter is used to monitor the use of intercontinental ballistic missiles that carry nuclear weapons.
According to the deputy prime minister, he had returned from a trip to a closed city in the Nizhny Novgorod region, known as Arzamas-16 for being secret, and touted as a nuclear weapons research center in Russia. He declared that a new generation of laser equipment using a wide electromagnetic range could replace conventional weapons.
“This is not an exotic idea, this is reality,” Borisov said.
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