President Vladimir Putin’s speech on the first of March revealed a whole panoply of new nuclear capabilities, from cruise missiles with nearly unlimited range to unmanned undersea vehicles also operating with extraordinary range, together with unprecedented speed and depth capabilities. Along the maritime periphery of Russia, tensions continue to escalate. Russian warships sortied en masse into the Baltic Sea on 20 February as part of a readiness drill, and in January, Russian news reported that a U.S. drone made a long-range intelligence-gathering sortie along Russia’s Black Sea border in the vicinity of Kerch, Sochi, and the Crimea.
