Russia will conduct further tests in “combat situations” with the new “Oreshnik” missile, which was fired at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin said. He also announced the start of serial production of the medium-range missile.
“We will continue these tests, including in combat situations, depending on the situation and the nature of threats to Russian security,” Putin said in a televised meeting with military officials on Friday.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte convenes a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council after the deployment of the new Russian medium-range missile. According to a spokesperson, the meeting on Tuesday in Brussels will discuss the recent Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (video above). In this context, the Kremlin speaks of a message to the West.
Flies at multiple scarf speeds
According to Russian information that has not yet been independently confirmed, the aircraft can fly at hypersonic speeds and cannot be intercepted. Experts assume that in theory it could also be equipped with nuclear explosives. Six individual nuclear warheads are said to have hit Dnipro on Thursday. They were not nuclear in nature, Putin said.
According to the alliance, the consultation in Brussels is being organized at the request of the government in Kiev and will take place at ambassadorial level. The NATO-Ukraine Council met for the first time at the level of heads of state and government during the NATO summit in Lithuania in 2023. The relatively new committee was established for exchanges in crisis situations.
Kremlin: Operation was a message to the West
Meanwhile, Moscow described the use of the new hypersonic intermediate-range missile against Ukraine as a message to the West. Russia will respond to hasty actions by Ukraine’s Western supporters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
The main message is that the reckless decisions and actions of Western countries that allowed Ukraine to attack Russian territory with missiles supplied by them “cannot continue without a response from the Russian side,” Peskov said.
“The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities and the contours of further retaliation if our concerns are not addressed have been quite clearly outlined,” the spokesperson continued.
USA was informed 30 minutes before the start
Russia was not obliged to warn the US about the attack, but informed them 30 minutes before it started. President Putin remains open to dialogue. But the outgoing administration of US President Joe Biden “prefers to continue on the path of escalation”.
One day after the Russian attack with the new hypersonic medium-range missile, Ukraine presented information about the missile. The rocket reached more than eleven times the speed of sound, according to the Ukrainian secret service. The plane flew 15 minutes from take-off in the Astrakhan region of southern Russia to impact in the city of Dnipro.
The rocket flew at a speed of more than eleven Mach
The missile was equipped with six nuclear warheads, each carrying six pieces of submunition. “The speed in the last part of the flight path was more than Mach eleven,” the intelligence said. One Mach corresponds to approximately 1,225 kilometers per hour.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had already demanded a decisive response from the international community to the Russian attack on Thursday. “This is a clear and serious expansion of the scale and brutality of this war, a cynical violation of the UN Charter by Russia,” Zelensky wrote on social networks.
UN: “Worrying development”
The United Nations spoke of a “worrisome development”. “This is all going in the wrong direction. What we want to see is that all parties take urgent steps to de-escalate the situation,” UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said in New York.
Source: Krone
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