Dombarovsky has hosted operational tests of strategic weapons in the past, being home, in part, to an active division of the 31st Missile Army of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces. In 2004 , an improved R-36M2 ICBM blasted off from one its silos during a test, for example.

“This is a great success and a big victory. This is a wonderful, excellent gift for the country for the New Year,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting after the test, which he personally oversaw. “It was a hard and time-consuming work which required breakthrough solutions in principal areas, and all this was done by our scientists, designers, and engineers.”

Russian forces conducted the test, meant to be operationally representative, from a silo at Dombarovsky Air Base near the country’s border with Kazakhstan on Dec. 26, 2018. The Avangard vehicle then successfully struck a designated target area at the Kura range on the Kamchatka Peninsula, which the Kremlin regularly uses as a proving ground for strategic weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), according to statements from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's Ministry of Defense. There is no independent confirmation that the test met its objectives.

Russia has released multiple videos of a recent test of its nuclear-capable Avangard hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, offering the best imagery publicly available so far of the complete weapon system. The Kremlin says this combination of vehicle and booster rocket is now in serial production and the Russians still plan to deploy the first examples operationally in 2019.

The two videos of the Avangard launch, shot from different angles, show the silo door opening and the rocket lifting off. There is still no publicly available imagery of the hypersonic vehicle itself. The new clips do appear to confirm that the weapon system is using a refurbished rocket booster from the Soviet UR-100N UTTKh ICBM. In March 2018, Russia announced that it would put the still-in-development RS-26 Rubezh ICBM, which it had originally expected to carry the Avangard, on hold indefinitely in order to refocus resources into the development and fielding of the hypersonic weapon. Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces only have a limited number of UR-100N UTTKh missiles still in operational service, but acquired a number of deactivated boosters from Ukraine in the early 2000s. Independent Ukraine had inherited these weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, but subsequently deactivated the silos and missiles. The modified UR-100N UTTKh carrier rocket for Avangard also appears to use a payload shroud similar to the SHS-2 on the Strela space launch vehicle. Strela uses a modified rocket booster from a UR-100NU ICBM.

Roscosmos The Strela space launch vehicle, which combines a modified rocket booster from a UR-100NU ICBM and the SHS-2 payload shroud.

The longer shroud likely reflects the overall length of Avangard. This is undoubtedly longer than the UR-100N UTTKh’s original payload bus, which carried six multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) nuclear warheads. As we at The War Zone have noted in the past, substituting the UR-100N UTTKh for the RS-26 as the carrier for the Avangard vehicle makes good sense as a way to get the high-tech weapon into service faster. Hypersonic boost-glide vehicles eliminate a significant number of vulnerabilities traditionally associated with ICBMs, which typically have readily detectable signatures and follow predictable flight paths. Existing U.S. space-based early warning systems would be able to spot the plume of the missile launch, but the United States has no effective means of tracking Avangard, which is reportedly capable of rapid and frequent course changes along a flatter trajectory, during its mid-course flight. The U.S. military's existing ballistic missile defense shield has no way of engaging the actual Avangard vehicle, either. Of course, at present, those defensive systems are in no way capable of undermining Russia’s overall nuclear deterrent capabilities, either. All of this reduces the required capabilities of the booster rocket component of the system to the sole job of getting the hypersonic boost glide vehicle to the appropriate initial speed and altitude. The speed of the weapon itself also mitigates some of the delay in using the liquid-fueled UR-100N UTTKh, which reportedly takes around 25 minutes to prepare for launch.

Sergey Kazak/TASS A standard UR-100N ICBM sits in its silo.