07:04 GMT, September 1, 2008 On the preliminary climax of the tensions with the West, Russia tested a Topol RS-12M intercontinental missile last Thursday. The missile test conducted in northern Russia came just a week after the U.S. signed the missile defence agreement with Poland (defpro.daily reported last week) and the Czech-US negotiations are likely to be completed on the missile shield treaty in September.

While Washington says the shield is aimed at countering potential long-range missile attacks from so-called rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, Moscow considers it a threat to its own security. Hours after the U.S.-Polish signing, Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow's response would go beyond diplomacy. The system to be based just 185 kilometres from Russian borders lacks "any target other than Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles," it said in a statement.

"Russia will be forced to react, and not only through diplomatic channels", it said without elaborating.

The first such reaction arrived very soon with the successfully conducted test launch of a Topol RS-12M intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile was launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia and flew 6,000 kilometres (3,700 miles) to hit a target on Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East, a military spokesman said.

As a response to the ground-based interceptors in Poland, Russia has been upgrading its Topol missiles "to avoid ground-based detection systemst," Alexander Vovk, a spokesman for Russia's strategic nuclear forces, said in televised remarks. "The launch was specially tasked to test this specific capability of the missile", he said.

"Russia is saying once again that it has the opportunity to overcome US missile defence," Anatoly Tsyganok, a retired colonel and head of the Centre for Military Forecasting, told AFP.

The Russian militarians approve, that the maneuver made by a warhead on a trajectory of its flight on a final site does not allow to carry out its interception and destruction by existing systems of antimissile defence.

Putin said, that "there is no need to fear Russia's actions, they are not aggressive... They are aimed at maintaining balance in the world order, and are extremely important for maintaining peace and security globally.

The Topol was first tested in 1983 but Russia has in recent years been adapting it to include countermeasures against missile defence, with the last test-firing in December 2007.