Washington: A US intelligence assessment has concluded that Russia may use its lethal new intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine again in "coming days," a US official said on Wednesday. The experimental Oreshnik missile is seen by US officials more as an attempt at intimidation than a game-changer on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information.
The threat comes as both sides work to gain a battlefield advantage in the nearly 3-year war that President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to end, and just days after the US promised close to $1 billion in new security aid to Ukraine. Other Western allies have suggested negotiations to end the war could begin this winter.
According to the official, Russia has only a handful of the Oreshnik missiles and they carry a smaller warhead than other missiles that Russia has regularly launched at Ukraine.
Russia used Oreshnik missile last month
Russia first fired the weapon in a November 21 missile attack against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Surveillance camera video of the strike showed huge fireballs piercing the darkness and slammed into the ground at astonishing speed. Within hours of the 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.
The attack came two days after Putin signed a revised version of Russia’s nuclear doctrine that lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons. The doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power. That strike also came soon after President Joe Biden agreed to loosen restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American-made longer-range weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory, and just one day after the US said it was giving Ukraine antipersonnel mines to help it slow Russia’s battlefield advances.
“We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against military facilities of the countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities,” Putin said at the time.
Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile
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 combat.
Intermediate-range missiles can fly between 500 to 5,500 kilometres. Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.
Fighting has escalated in the grinding war as both Russia and Ukraine scramble to get an upper hand in any coming negotiations. Trump's inauguration next month has also raised questions about how much support the U.S. will continue to provide to Kyiv.
Trump has insisted in recent days that Russia and Ukraine immediately reach a ceasefire and said Ukraine should likely prepare to receive less US military aid. Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump wrote on social media last weekend, referring to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, announced a $988 million long-term aid package last weekend. That funding is on top of an additional $725 million in US military assistance, including counter-drone systems and HIMARS munitions, announced early last week that would be drawn from the Pentagon’s stockpiles to more quickly get to the front lines. The US has provided Ukraine with more than $62 billion in military aid since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
(With inputs from agency)
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