Russia seeks to intimidate Ukraine with new missile, officials say

KYIV – By launching a new nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile at Ukraine on Thursday, Russia was threatening Kyiv and its Western allies with the aim of stopping Ukrainian strikes with Western-supplied weapons on Russian territory – or else.

The attack on the eastern city of Dnipro has spurred fears in the West over a major escalation in the ongoing war and prompted Ukraine to request new air defense capabilities from Washington to help intercept this type of missile.

But analysts and officials in Ukraine and the West, speaking Friday, said that while the attack had been accompanied by a major increase in threatening statements, it was ultimately just more Kremlin bravado.

Moscow aimed to “intimidate those who support Ukraine,” NATO spokeswoman Farah Dakhlallah said in an email. “Deploying this capability will neither change the course of the conflict nor deter NATO Allies from supporting Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency, GUR, released new details about the missile on Friday. It flew at roughly 11 times the speed of sound and took about 15 minutes to reach Dnipro from Russia’s coastal Astrakhan region. It was fitted with six warheads, the agency said, each of which contained six submunitions.

GUR chief Kyrylo Budanov said Friday that the missile is experimental and that Ukraine knows that at least two test versions were set to be made. The missile is not yet in “series production, thank God,” he said Friday.

“The fact that they used it in a nuclear-free version is, as they say, a warning from them, that they are not completely crazy,” he said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Russia hit Dnipro with a medium-range “nonnuclear hypersonic ballistic” missile dubbed “Oreshnik,” which means hazel in Russian. The Pentagon said the missile, which was armed with a conventional warhead, was an experimental variant of Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh intermediate-range ballistic missile.

Ukraine has not fully disclosed the extent of damage from the Russian missile strike, beyond saying it struck an industrial area in the city. Kyiv does not typically comment on damage to military sites.

Putin said the attack on Dnipro was a “test” of the weapon, in response to the Biden administration’s recent decision authorizing Ukraine to fire its U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), with a range of up 190 miles, at targets inside Russia.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian forces for the first time fired ATACMS inside of Russia, targeting a weapons depot in Bryansk region.

The next day, they employed U.K.-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to attack Russia’s Kursk region, in an operation one Ukrainian official described Friday as “successful.”

In the wake of the attacks, there were clear concerns over Russian retaliation, including the day-long closure of foreign diplomatic missions in Kyiv, including the U.S. Embassy, which cited intelligence over a potential Russian attack. On Friday, a parliamentary session was canceled, again over fears of an attack.

“The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities,” Peskov said, adding that “the contours of further retaliatory actions … have also been clearly outlined.”

In the wake of the strike, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said they would “take seriously the rhetoric coming out of Russia, but our focus remains on Ukraine and supporting Ukraine with what it needs.”

“We don’t want this to widen into a regional conflict; we don’t want war with Russia,” she added.

Observers cast doubt on whether Russia has enough of the missiles to regularly launch such strikes and said that the attack was probably spurred by real fears in Russia over how to continue supplying the front lines if Ukraine is able to target key weapons depots and other rear support locations with Western missiles.

“This is definitely an attempt to intimidate the West and an attempt to force the West not to help Ukraine. But on the other hand, this is also a manifestation of the absolute panic of Putin himself,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office.

Russia’s strategy has always been to test the global response to its various escalations, he added, pointing to how Moscow waited to see how the West would respond to its full-scale invasion in February 2022, frequent missile strikes on civilians, attacks on the power grid, and more recently, the deployment of North Korean troops and regular executions of prisoners on the battlefield.

“This is all testing,” Podolyak said. “And now there is a new attempt – an intercontinental attack on the civilian population. What’s next?”

In Russia, the missile attack was presented as a major victory and a strong message to the country’s enemies.

Friday’s morning edition of the Russian propaganda show “60 Minutes” opened with a digest of international media headlines, responding to the launch.

“The British Mirror says that the Oreshnik launch was a World War 3 warning shot. … Put more simply, the new Russian hypersonic missile is an untouchable weapon,” said host Olga Skabeeva. “All that’s to say, (the Western media) understood us correctly.”

Some analysts said that the new escalation is a sign that Moscow does not have a solid exit strategy from the war. Writing on Telegram, Russian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, honorary senior research associate at the University College of London, said that his intuition was telling him “that Putin is not bluffing.”

“It is not that he wanted a nuclear war and to burn in its fire … but in the current situation he is ambivalent about such a possibility,” he wrote. This has created a dangerous scenario, he wrote, where “the circumstances are such that he does not have the option of ‘relative defeat.’ … They simply do not have an exit strategy in case of defeat.”

Mykola Bielieskov, a political analyst linked to Ukraine’s presidential office, said he feared Russia was trying to convince President-elect Donald Trump’s team that there is a looming risk of World War III.

“If the U.S. backs down under these threats, Ukraine defense will be endangered,” he said. “Thus no more sitting on two chairs as the Biden administration tried to do all along.”

The latest threats, coming directly from Putin, marked a risky escalation in rhetoric that largely appears intended to stoke Western fears of a broadening conflict, said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general who is now a distinguished policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“We shouldn’t take things lightly. That’s the whole point, that you should never take the risk of nuclear escalation lightly,” he said.

Yet the Kremlin had created a problem for itself by making dozens of nuclear threats during the war, “because it’s becoming loose talk.”

“I don’t think Putin wants a nuclear war,” he added, but the threats were problematic “because it goes against the grammar of nuclear deterrence … which is that you try to avoid a situation where there is miscalculation or misinterpretation by one side or another.”

- – -

Francis reported from Brussels. Francesca Ebel in London, Kostiantyn Khudov and Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.