According to a representative of the Russian Navy, Dmitry Donskoy submarine will conduct a test launch of the Bulava missile "by the end of the month". This would be a second Bulava launch this year - previous one, on September 18, 2008, was not quite successful.

Most of the known failures and reported problems in the test history of Bulava were related to performance of missile stages. The Navy representative indicated, however, that there were also other problems - in his words, "almost all missiles left the launch tube" (emphasis added). If there were indeed failures on that stage, they probably were not reported at the time and are not included in the list of known tests. But maybe I'm reading too much into it.