Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the War in Ukraine myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Russia used a hypersonic, nuclear-capable missile against Ukraine in an attack on Thursday night, Moscow said, as Kyiv warned of a “grave threat” to the region as a whole.
Ukraine’s air force confirmed that a ballistic missile flying at a speed of up to 13,000 kilometres an hour and fired from the Kapustin Yar training ground in Russia had hit “infrastructure facilities” near the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, about 100km from the Polish border.
It said the strike was part of an overnight raid that involved 242 drones as well as 36 ballistic and cruise missiles.
Russia’s defence ministry said the missile used was the “Oreshnik”, a ballistic, hypersonic weapon equipped to fire multiple conventional or nuclear warheads.
“Such a strike close to [the] EU and Nato border is a grave threat to the security on the European continent and a test for the transatlantic community,” Andriy Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, posted on X, adding that Kyiv would call for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council.
Moscow has only used the Oreshnik on one previous occasion during its war in Ukraine, when it fired the missile in November 2024 on a target near the city of Dnipro, in the south-east of the country.
The Russian defence ministry said Thursday’s missile assault was a response to what it said was a Ukrainian drone strike last month on President Vladimir Putin’s residence — an attack that Kyiv denies ever took place.
“It is absurd that Russia attempts to justify this strike with the fake ‘Putin residence attack’ that never happened,” Sybiha said.
Thursday’s attack also came after Moscow rejected a plan to deploy French and British troops in Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire. The Russian government has warned that such troops “will be considered legitimate military targets”.
Fabian Hoffmann, a missile expert at the University of Oslo, said the Oreshnik was likely to be based on the RS-26 Rubezh, a missile that was “conceived, tested and publicly presented as a nuclear delivery system”.
As such, Hoffmann said, “it would appear that the Oreshnik is a dual-capable ballistic missile that can be equipped with conventional and nuclear . . . payloads”.
The broader Russian attack overnight hit Kyiv and the surrounding region, with residents told at 11pm that dozens of drones were converging on the capital from the east and the south, before a series of explosions roared over the capital.
Four people died and at least 24 were injured in the attack on the capital, authorities said.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said critical infrastructure had been damaged, with power and water cuts and one medical worker killed. No casualties were reported in the Lviv region, authorities said.
Over the past few months Russian forces have sought to methodically destroy the country’s power plants and substations. A drone attack on Wednesday in the south-eastern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk triggered massive blackouts in the two regions.
The latest attack coincides with freezing temperatures across Ukraine.
In Kyiv, snow covered the streets on Friday morning, with temperatures of about minus 7 expected during the day that could reach minus 20 across Ukraine during the weekend.
Credit: Source link
