8: Tomahawk Missile Threat Puts Pressure on Putin's Air Defenses. Rebecca Grant and Gordon Chang discuss how Russia is highly anxious about the possible deployment of US Tomahawk land-attack missiles to Ukraine. Tomahawks, with a 1,600-mile range, can fly lo

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 21 October 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Tomahawk Missile Threat Puts Pressure on Putin's Air Defenses. Rebecca Grant and Gordon Chang discuss how Russia is highly anxious about the possible deployment of US Tomahawk land-attack missiles to Ukraine. Tomahawks, with a 1,600-mile range, can fly low and strike over 60 Russian air bases and critical energy targets. Experts say the weapon presents an "almost unsolvable air defense problem" for Russia because Putin lacks sufficient air defense systems, like the S-400, to protect such a wide area.
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0:24.0	This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Baxter. Gordon Chang is here. My colleague and co-host and friend
0:30.4	Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang. Tomahawk, much in the news. What is it? Is there a weapon that Russia pays attention to? Why do I know that?
0:40.5	Because at the Valdei Conference several weeks before, Mr. Putin went out of his way to point to the
0:46.4	Tomahawk as unacceptable. That's right. The president of the Russian Federation is pointing to
0:52.2	an American weapon system that's been at sea for some years, as unacceptable if introduced into the Ukrainian theater.
1:01.0	We welcome Rebecca Grant, a vice president of the Lexington Institute, to help us understand why suddenly the Kremlin has anxiety about a weapon system.
1:11.9	Rebecca, a very good evening to you with the Tomahawk.
1:14.2	It's named chiefly from the 18th century artifact of the Native American famous stories,
1:21.6	scalping and all of that.
1:22.9	But in any event, what I understand from looking it up online and chatting with Ara at
1:29.7	Krak is that it has a range of 1,500, 1,600 miles. It can hit what it's aiming at. In other
1:36.3	words, if there's a smoking room on one side of the hall and a non-smoking room on the other,
1:41.5	it can be designated which room to hit. It can carry a nuclear
1:45.8	warhead, but mostly it carries a pretty good munitions package, and chiefly associated with the
1:52.2	U.S. Navy, fired at sea. I believe we've seen a number of them over the years fired, a spectacular
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