View from London: Putin says Russia fired experimental ballistic missile into Ukraine

Moscow retaliates after the firing of US and UK-made long-range missiles into Russian territory.

The use of the ‘Oreshnik’ missile comes after Ukraine launched US-made long-range ATACMS missiles and British Storm Shadows at Russian territory in recent days. Responding to the ATACMS strikes, Russia altered its nuclear doctrine to lower its threshold for first use, ‘The Financial Times’ writes.

Vladimir Putin has said Moscow fired an experimental hypersonic missile at Ukraine on Thursday in response to the US and UK allowing Kyiv to use advanced western weaponry at targets inside Russia.The president of Russia said the ‘Oreshnik’ missile, which can carry a nuclear warhead, targeted a factory in Dnipro, which was formerly the Soviet Union’s top-secret rocket-building facility.

A senior Ukrainian military official told the Financial Times that the missile was an RS-26 Rubezh, which has a range of up to 6,000km.The US later clarified that the missile Russia used was based on an intercontinental ballistic missile model, but continued to describe it as an “intermediate-range” missile.

“I can confirm that Russia did launch an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile. This IRBM was based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile model,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

Putin said Russia would respond to “escalation... decisively and correspondingly”. Russia reserved the right to use its weaponry against military targets in countries that allowed Ukraine to use their weapons against Moscow’s forces, he added.

The use of the RS-26 comes after Ukraine launched US-made long-range Atacms missiles and British Storm Shadows at Russian territory in recent days.

Responding to the Atacms strikes, Russia altered its nuclear doctrine to lower its threshold for first use.

The range of ICBMs, which are designed to carry nuclear warheads between continents, is far greater than that of missiles such as Atacms and Storm Shadows, which can travel 250km-300km.

Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, said footage of the strike suggested the missile carried a multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle payload — exclusively used for deploying nuclear warheads.

“The signal here is: ‘Today the strike was with a non-nuclear payload, tomorrow it could be a nuclear one’,” Hoffman said.

President Putin says missile was in reply to Kyiv’s strikes in Russia with western missiles, and appears to directly threaten US and UK, writes ‘The Guardian’. Apparently, the world has begun to suspect something…

Vladimir Putin has said Russia fired an experimental ballistic missile at a military site in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday morning, and that Moscow “had the right” to strike western countries that provided Kyiv with weapons used against Russian targets.

The Russian president, speaking during an unannounced televised address to the nation, appeared to directly threaten the US and UK, who earlier this week allowed Ukraine to fire western-made Atacms and Storm Shadow missiles into Russia.

The new ballistic missile was called Oreshnik [the hazel], Putin said, and its deployment “was a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate and short-range missiles”. He said Russia would “respond decisively and symmetrically” in the event of an escalation.

“Russia reserves the right to use weapons against targets in countries that permit their weapons to be used against Russian targets,” Putin added, in his most explicit threat to attack western countries who have been providing military aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

US and UK sources indicated that they believed the missile fired on Dnipro was an experimental nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which has a theoretical range of below 3,420 miles (5,500km). That is enough to reach Europe from where it was fired in south-western Russia, but not the US.

Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University who specialises in missile technology and nuclear strategy, said the significance of the Oreshnik missile strike was that it appeared to carry a type of payload that “is exclusively associated with nuclear-capable missiles”.

Ukraine used US Atacms missiles to target what it said was a weapons depot in Russia’s south-western Bryansk region on Monday, and fired a salvo of Storm Shadow missiles on Wednesday at a command post in Kursk, where Kyiv’s forces hold a small bridgehead of territory inside Russia.

A US official told the Guardian that Russia had launched an “experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile” at Ukraine, of which Russia likely possesses only a “handful”. UK sources made similar comments and the weapon was described as having a range of a few thousand kilometres.

A US official said Russia had “pre-notified” Washington of the launch before the attack in an attempt to prevent a retaliation – though Russia said it had only done so 30 minutes before through the US’s Nuclear Threat Reduction Center, according to the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov.

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs