Russia’s military has conducted a second test of its new intercontinental ballistic missile, which President Vladimir Putin claims “can reach any point in the world”.

The launch of the Sarmat missile system at a spaceport in western Russia on Friday comes as tensions between the nation and the West reach levels not seen since the Cold War.

Russia’s ministry of defence shared a video of the launch on Twitter, with the Sarmat missile set to replace the Soviet-era Veovoda missile.

New heavy #ICBM #Sarmat undergoes test at #Plesetsk Cosmodrome to replace the Soviet-era #Voevoda pic.twitter.com/oECCevEp8q

— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) March 30, 2018

President Putin unveiled details of the nuclear weapon in March during his annual State of the Union address – just weeks before his reelection a fortnight ago.

“It can attack any target, through the North or South Pole, it is a powerful weapon and no missile defence system will be able to withstand,” he said.

“This is unheard of and nobody else has such a system in the world. They might create something like this in the future but by then our guys will have created something new as well.”

President Putin unveiled a suite of other weapons during his speech, including a supersonic weapon that cannot be tracked by anti-missile systems.

The second Sarmat missile test comes as East-West relations sour, leading to fears of a diplomatic crisis.

Mr Trump agrees that Moscow was behind the UK spy attack.

The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, said the crisis recalled the Cold War, The New York Times reported, only without the controls and channels of communication established before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union “to make sure things would not get out of control when tensions rise.”

On Thursday, the Kremlin announced it would expel 60 American diplomats and close the US consulate in St Petersburg after the United States and European nations announced coordinated expulsions of Russian diplomats.

It comes after the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain on March 4.

Russia denies it was involved in the attack but US President Donald Trump has agreed with European leaders that Russia most likely coordinated the poisoning.

Russia remains under international sanctions for its annexation of Crimea in southern Ukraine in 2014 and its alleged role in a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine in the same year.

The sanctions have hurt Russia’s economy but things have improved recently. The International Monetary Fund predicts gross domestic product growth of 1.7 percent in 2018.