9K720 Iskander-M (SS-26 Stone)

Iskander is designed for tactical strikes on small, high value land targets. The export variant has a range of 280 km, compliant with the 300 km limit of the Missitle Technology Control Regime, but the variant in Russian service has a range of 500 km, similar to that of the SS-23 Spider which was destroyed under the INF treaty.

The system was created out of the need to create a new road mobile, nuclear-capable missile system which would be in line with the provisions of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which banned ground-based nuclear missile systems in the 500-5,500 km range. The Iskander derives its name from Alexander the Great, the 4th century BC Macedonian king who is known in the nations of the Caucuses and Central Asia as Iskander.

The first Iskanders were adopted into service with the Russian military in the mid-2000s. The system was developed by engineers at the KB Mashinostroyeniya, a Moscow region defense concern. Its missiles and ground equipment are manufactured by defense companies in Udmurtia and Volgograd.

Russia’s Missile Troops began training their Belarusian counterparts in the use of the Iskander missile system on 03 April 2023. An undisclosed number of the mobile, nuclear-capable short-range ballistic missile systems were sent to Belarus in late 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko confirmed their agreement on the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“On April 3, we start training crews. On July 1, we will complete the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory,” Putin said in a television interview late last month. He added that Moscow has already handed Iskander missile systems to Minsk, and provided its ally with support to reequip combat aircraft to carry nuclear weapons.

By 2019 Russia had ten to twelve Iskander brigades scattered across the country. A single brigade has twelve vehicles with two missiles apiece, which theoretically provides a volley of 288 Iskanders against an individual enemy. As of 2023, Russia’s arsenal of Iskander missile systems consisted of 162 or more firing platforms, 150 of them in the ground forces, and 12 among the Navy’s coastal defense troops. The number of missiles of various modifications is kept under wraps, but is thought to be in the hundreds.

Russia’s nuclear doctrine, published by the Foreign Ministry in June 2020, deems nuclear weapons of any kind “exclusively a means of deterrence” whose use would be considered only as an “extreme and compelled measure” in response to the enemy use of weapons of mass destruction against Russia or its allies, or a conventional attack so severe that the “very existence of the state” is deemed to be jeopardized. President Putin has hinted at the need to revise the nuclear doctrine to allow for preventative nuclear strikes – which would bring the doctrine closer to that of the Pentagon, but this proposal has yet to be laid down in writing.