Rusia President Vladimir Putin seems really serious about the invasion of Ukraine. Rusia Kinzhal missile caused an uproar around the world, after Rusia announced the use of Kinzhal missiles for the first time in the Ukraine war, Saturday, March 19, 2022.
How not, Rusia’s hypersonic missiles whose warheads can be replaced with nuclear warheads have destroyed underground depots for storing Ukrainian missiles and aircraft ammunition.
The hypersonic missile, codenamed Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, is one of several high-tech weapons launched by Russia in 2018.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Kinzhal missile an “ideal weapon” because it could be fired from the Mig 31K fighter aircraft.
The Kinzhal missile weighs about 1,000 pounds (480 kilograms) and typically carries a high-explosive tip. One thing that makes the Kinzhal missile terrible is that its warhead can be armed with a nuclear weighing the same as 480 Kg and its explosive power equivalent to 100 to 500 kilotons of TNT.
So that the Kinzhal missile is able to accelerate quickly to more than 4 times the speed of sound, about 3,000 miles per hour or 5,000 km / hour when launched.
Even the Kh-47M2 missile, once fired and capable of traveling through the air at a maximum speed of up to 12 times the speed of sound, is about (9,200 miles per hour or 14,800 km/h. Anything faster than Mach 5 or five times the speed of sound, is considered ” hypersonic”.
This capability is certainly very difficult to track the strongest radar and is stopped by the most powerful air defense systems today.
Even more powerful, the Kinzhal missile is capable of reaching a radius of up to 1,800 miles or 3,000 km.
Due to its design the Kinzhal missile moves so fast that it is nearly impossible to track and intercept. They are also said to perform sharp maneuvers in flight at hypersonic speeds that allow them to evade enemy missile defenses.
The extremely high speed also makes the Kinzhal missile capable of penetrating heavily armored targets. For example, an underground armory in western Ukraine is said to have been the target of the latest attack.
Military experts praised the speed and penetrating power of the Kinzhal missile as extremely threatening. However; one analyst said the main advantage of using the Kinzal missile was more in the psychological effect than the strategic impact.
“Basically, it doesn’t change the battlefield, but it certainly has an effect in terms of psychological propaganda, to frighten everyone,” Russian military analyst and journalist Pavel Felgenhauer told Euronews after the latest attack.
The Diplomat magazine analyzed in 2018 that Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile could drastically change the balance of power in the Pacific. For, if the Kinzhal missile were deployed to Russia’s Far East region, it could have “significant implications for the balance of power in the Pacific,”.
The use of the Kinzhal missile allows Russian fighter jets to target US warships up to 2,200 miles (3,500 km) from their shores. The greatness of the Kinzhal missile is not only in its warhead capable of destroying large warships, but also in its hypersonic speed and kinetic energy, which makes it difficult for radar to detect and neutralize. (**)
