The Jamestown Foundation – Eurasia Daily Monitor:

Russia continues to press ahead with its nuclear weapons modernization program; however, domestic production difficulties and the coronavirus pandemic hindered the development of its latest strategic systems during the course of the last year.

In 2020, the Strategic Missile Forces (Raketnye Voyska Strategicheskogo Naznacheniya—RVSN) were ordered to deploy for combat duty 20 launchers armed with Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), as well as 2 UR-100N UTTH launchers with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle (RIA Novosti, December 24, 2019 and October 13, 2020). These tasks were completed. Two regiments of the RVSN’s Barnaul Missile Division were re-equipped with mobile-based Yars ICBMs, while a missile regiment of the Kozelsk division was filled out by equipping it with a separate variant of this ICBM complex (Izvestia, December 21, 2020). The Dombarovsky Division, meanwhile, received two missiles with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle (Izvestia, December 22, 2020). Yet, besides these modest accomplishments, Russia’s nuclear arms modernization efforts during the past 12 months saw wide-ranging delays affecting its flagship projects.

Last year was supposed to see the first flight design tests of Russia’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat. But those never occurred. The initial stage of testing is to involve two launches of a missile with a mass-dimensional dummy warhead, from the silo at the Plesetsk cosmodrome to the Kura test range in Kamchatka. Ultimately, Russia plans to conduct at least five test launches in total before starting operational production. The phase one test launches were originally scheduled for the beginning of 2019 (RIA Novosti, December 17, 2018). However, in July 2019, those flight tests were postponed to the end of 2020 (Interfax, July 6, 2019)…

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