The missile meant to strike fear in Russia's enemies fails once again

DEC 1, 2025 5:36 PM



A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet.

Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.

A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.

The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, the telltale sign of a toxic mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful ICBMs. Satellite images taken since Friday show a crater and burn scar near the missile silo.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/the-missile-meant-to-strike-fear-in-russias-enemies-fails-once-again/