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.
While Ukraine described it as an intercontinental missile, both the Russian president and a US official classified it as a mid-range ballistic missile, without specifying the type. A Nato spokesperson said it had been an experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile.
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.
Some analysts dispute the classification of RS-26 as an intercontinental missile, arguing that, because it has a shorter range than most ICBMs, it sits in a grey area between that designation and an intermediate-range missile.
But under the US and Russia’s New Start nuclear arms control treaty of 2010, an ICBM is defined as a “land-based ballistic missile with a range in excess of 5,500km”.
Before Thursday, no ICBM had been recorded as being used in conflict.
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.
Ukraine said it had intercepted six of the accompanying Russian missiles, but not what it said was the RS-26, which was launched from Russia’s southern Astrakhan region.
British defence secretary John Healey referred on Thursday to “unconfirmed reports” of “a new ballistic missile” launched at Ukraine that the Russians “have been preparing for months”. Officials in Berlin said that, if confirmed, the ICBM attack would “once again show Putin’s inhuman ruthlessness”.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday on X: “Our insane neighbour has once again revealed its true nature.”
He added the Russian missile’s “speed and altitude suggest intercontinental ballistic capabilities. Investigations are ongoing”.
Two people were injured in the attack, local authorities said. It is not clear what the missile was targeting or the extent of the damage caused.
The US official said it was likely Russia only had a few of these missiles and Ukraine had withstood “countless attacks, including from missiles with significantly larger warheads”. They added the weapon would not be “a game-changer in this conflict”.
Nato spokesperson Farah Dakhlallah said the strike was yet another example of Russia’s attacks against Ukrainian cities.
“Russia aims to terrorise the civilian population in Ukraine and intimidate those who support Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s illegal and unprovoked aggression. Deploying this capability will neither change the course of the conflict nor deter Nato allies from supporting Ukraine.”
Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the UN Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, wrote on X: “Using these kinds of missiles, whether RS-26 or a true ICBM, in a conventional role does not make a lot of sense because of their relatively low-accuracy and high cost.”
“But this kind of a strike might have a value as a signal,” 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.
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Moscow has previously used shorter-range nuclear-capable missiles to hit Ukraine. Russian forces have repeatedly fired ground-launched Iskander short-range ballistic missiles and the air-launched hypersonic Kinzhal missile, both capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Most ICBMs have a range far greater than the RS-26 and can travel between 8,000km and 15,000km.
Podvig said the “RS-26 is not really an intercontinental missile. It was tested at the range of more than 5,500km, but it is in effect an intermediate-range missile.”
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. “There certainly was no military value to it. If it was about striking certain targets, there would have been many more and more capable missile systems for that.”
The strike comes two months before Donald Trump re-enters the White House. The US president-elect has pledged to bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end, without specifying how he would do so.
Ukrainian military expert Mykhailo Samus said Russia would have had to notify the US that it planned to launch an ICBM to avoid the risk of US systems mistaking it for a nuclear attack on Nato.
He added Ukraine’s air defences do not have the capability to intercept an ICBM.
Cartography by Steven Bernard
Additional reporting by Guy Chazan in Berlin