Russia's Yasen-class submarines have long been seen as a tough challenge for the US Navy. A Russian shipbuilding official said that work is underway to arm them with Zircon hypersonic missiles. Russia's Yasen-class nuclear-powered cruise-missile submarines are quiet, difficult to track, heavily armed, and able to conduct attacks against land- and sea-based targets. The Russian Yasen-class submarines "are designed to deploy undetected within cruise-missile range of our coastlines to threaten critical infrastructure during an escalating crisis," the commander said a year later in congressional testimony. It may still be some time before Russia's Yasen-class submarines deploy with hypersonic weapons, but the Admiral Gorshkov set sail earlier this year on a deployment that took it into the Atlantic Ocean armed with Zircon hypersonic missiles.

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Persons: Russia's, Alexei Rakhmanov, Dave Johnson, Lev Fedoseyev, Glen VanHerck, Gorshkov, Vladimir Putin, Gorshkov —, Putin, Zumwalt Organizations: US Navy, Service, United Shipbuilding Corporation, US, Naval, Systems, Getty, US Air Force, US Northern Command, North American Aerospace Defense Command, NATO, Russian Navy, Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, AP, Army, Navy, Ingalls Shipbuilding Locations: Wall, Silicon, Russian, Severomorsk, Russia, Barents, China, Virginia, San Diego, Pascagoula , Mississippi, Ingalls