Putin Oversees Strategic Nuclear Drill Ahead of Trump Summit

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday supervised a planned exercise of the country’s strategic nuclear forces that tested command-and-control procedures and included missile launches from land, sea and air, Russian officials said. The drills, conducted from the Kremlin’s crisis command room and carried out at facilities from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the north to the Barents Sea and a test range in Kamchatka, took place amid uncertainty over a proposed summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

“Today, we have a scheduled strategic nuclear forces management drill,” Putin said in televised remarks as he oversaw the exercise with his top military leadership. The Defense Ministry released video footage showing a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Plesetsk toward a far eastern test site in Kamchatka, a Sineva ICBM fired from the nuclear submarine Bryansk in the Barents Sea, and Tu-95MS strategic bombers releasing long-range cruise missiles over northern waters.

Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov briefed Putin that the exercise included practicing the sequence of actions for authorizing and deploying nuclear weapons, according to the Kremlin. The...