Putin said the missile was called the “Oreshnik” — Russian for “hazelnut tree.”
The surveillance camera video of the Russian missile attack in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was brief but chilling: Six huge fireballs pierced the darkness and slammed into the ground at astonishing speed.
Within hours of the November 21 attack on the military facility, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the rare step of speaking on national TV to boast about the new, hypersonic missile. He warned the West that its next use could be against Ukraine’s NATO allies who allowed Kyiv to use their longer-range missiles to strike inside Russia.
A satisfied smile played across Putin’s face as he described how the Oreshnik streaks to its target at 10 times the speed of sound, or Mach 10, “like a meteorite,” and claimed it was immune to any missile defense system.
Gen. Sergei Karakayev, head of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, said the Oreshnik could carry nuclear or conventional warheads and has a range to reach any European target.
The Pentagon said the Oreshnik was an experimental type of intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM, based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. The attack marked the first time such a weapon was used in a war.
Intermediate-range missiles can fly between 500 to 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,400 miles). Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.
Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate said the missile had six warheads, each carrying six submunitions. Its payload of independently targetable warheads, like a cluster of hazelnuts growing on a tree, could be the inspiration for the missile’s name.
Video of the attack appeared to show six warheads surrounded by clouds of plasma raining down in a fiery descent. The six submunitions released by each warhead apparently were unarmed but had high kinetic energy estimated to deliver a destructive force equivalent to tons of explosives.
Putin claimed the weapon is so powerful that using several such missiles — even fitted with conventional warheads — could be as devastating as a nuclear strike. It’s capable of destroying underground bunkers “three, four or more floors down,” he boasted, threatening to use it against the government district in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s Security Service showed The Associated Press wreckage of the missile — charred, mangled wires and an ashen airframe — at Dnipro’s Pivdenmash plant that built missiles when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. There were no fatalities in the attack, and authorities haven’t described the damage to the plant. They said the missile was fired from the 4th Missile Test Range of Kapustin Yar in Russia’s Astrakhan region on the Caspian Sea.
Russia has used an assortment of missiles to pummel Ukraine since the start of its invasion in February 2022, but none had the range and power of Oreshnik.
They included subsonic long-range cruise missiles that carry about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of explosives, enough to inflict a significant damage to Ukrainian power plants and other key infrastructure. The winged, jet-propelled cruise missiles have a range of up to 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles), able to reach all of Ukraine.
Russia also used swarms of inexpensive, Iranian-designed drones that carry only about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of explosives. The slow-flying drones are relatively easy to intercept, but Russia used dozens of them at a time to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses and divert attention from simultaneously launched cruise missiles.
