Sure is, but verifies the spiral pattern. Perhaps the sprial is a glory with a shadow from the exhaust plume projected on it? The plume would be in a spiral pattern due to the helical motion of the rocket and it seems to dissipate towards the end.
Sounds likely.
See what happened to a self-destructed Trident II missile:
Every piece which had residual unbalanced thrust has begun producing smoke spirals in the air. It looked about the same during the Challenger catastrophe, when the SRB's flew away uncontrolled and were remotely exploded.
Now, if we mentally remove the air and add some altitude and speed to the video above, we can image how the huge spiral could be produced. Perhaps, its size is due to the booster's engine thrusting at full output and spinning at the same time. I guess, any observer closer to the ground track of the missile could see a nice flying saucer throwing beams around.
Unfortunately, the Eastern Kola peninsula is a very sparsely populated area, so there might not be many observers there.
By the way, my yelling on a Russian forum about this sighting produced a sort of stir in our mass media, who are now eager to find out why our MoD neither acknowledges or disproves the fact of the launch. Some leaks indicate that the launch has been performed and was unsuccessful due to the 3rd booster stage's failure.
In the usual Bulava manner, the new failure is not like any of the previous ones. Which creates huge problems for the entire project 955 "Boreas" class submarines, two of which are under construction, one's keel is being laid and another one is already oh her trial trips:
This class was designed to accomodate this damned RSM-56 which is likely to be cancelled if the failures persist.
---------- Post added at 13:19 ---------- Previous post was at 13:13 ----------
Ah, an update. The acknowledgment has just appeared.
http://itar-tass.com/level2.html?NewsID=14625844&PageNum=0
Press service of Russian Ministry of Defence reports:
On December 9, a test launch of the ballistic missile Bulava has been performed from off the Dmitry Donskoy submarine missile cruiser in the submerged position at the White Sea's waters. After the ship's returning to the base, the flight telemetry data have been analyzed. The results confirm the first two booster stages performed nominally, while at the third stage a failure occurred resulting in unstable rocket engine's performance.