How Putin ended up launching the nuclear-capable Oresnik missile into battle against Ukraine. “They're really crazy”

Russia used the hypersonic missile for the third time on Saturday night against Ukraine, writes AFP. The weapon was launched following Russia's setbacks on the battlefield, including Ukraine's attack on Moscow last week.

Russia's massive attack overnight, which used an Oresnik medium-range ballistic missile, “is a political intimidation tactic and a risky policy approaching the brink of a nuclear conflict,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas warned.

“Russia has reached a stalemate on the battlefield, so it is terrorizing Ukraine with deliberate strikes on city centers. These are abominable acts of terrorism designed to kill as many civilians as possible,” Kallas wrote on X.

The President of Ukraine was more direct. “They are really crazy,” Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram.

Russia has hit Ukraine three times with the Oreshnik, a state-of-the-art missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, a weapon whose power has been repeatedly praised by President Vladimir Putin.

This rocket was used in late 2024, early 2026, and Saturday.

First use, in 2024

The existence of this missile, capable of flying at hypersonic speeds, was revealed on November 21, 2024, when it hit a military plant in the city of Dnipro in central Ukraine.

That attack was presented by Moscow as a response to Ukrainian strikes launched at the time against Russia with American and British ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles.

Since then, Moscow has announced the start of mass production. And Belarus, an ally of Russia located at the gates of the EU, indicated that it deployed the missile on its territory in mid-December 2025.

“Oreșnik can threaten almost all of Europe”

According to data provided by Moscow, the Oreshnik is a “medium-range” ballistic missile that can hit targets located between 3,000 and 5,500 km.

Oreșnik does not therefore fall into the category of intercontinental missiles (with a range of over 5,500 km).

And yet, if launched from the Russian Far East, it could theoretically hit targets on the West Coast of the United States.

“The Oreșnik missile can (also) threaten almost all of Europe,” according to Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

Until 2019, Russia and the United States could not field such missiles, constrained by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987 during the Cold War.

But in 2019, US President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the deal, accusing Moscow of violating it, opening the way for a new arms race.

3 kilometers per second

In late 2024, during a televised meeting with military officials, Vladimir Putin assured that Moscow had a stockpile of such missiles “ready for use”.

The Oresnik “is based on the Russian intercontinental ballistic missile model RS-26 Roubej,” which in turn is derived from the “RS-24 Iars,” according to the Pentagon.

The weapons program of the RS-26 Roubej, whose first successful test dates back to 2012, was frozen in 2018, according to Russian state agency TASS.

It suffered from a lack of resources to run this project “simultaneously” with the development of the next-generation Avangard hypersonic systems, which should be able to hit a target almost anywhere in the world.

According to Vladimir Putin, the Oresnik missile can reach a speed of Mach 10, “that is, 2.5-3 kilometers per second” (about 12,350 km/h), and “the temperature of the impactors reaches 4,000 °C”, that is, “almost as much, according to him, as on the surface of the Sun.”

According to the Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), the speed reached by the missile in late November 2024 “in the final part of the trajectory” was “higher than Mach 11” (about 13,600 km/h).

More warheads

Oresnik would also be equipped with multiple warheads, each following an independent trajectory upon entering the atmosphere, which would further increase the difficulty of interception, Putin said.

According to Polish military analyst Marcin Andrzej Piotrowski, the Oreșnik missile's warheads “penetrate the atmosphere and reach their targets at hypersonic speeds.”

A clip of the Nov. 21, 2024, Russian launch circulated on social media showed six successive powerful flashes at the time of the attack, a sign, according to Ukrainian officials, that the missile “was equipped with six warheads.”

AFP journalists present in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, after the first missile was fired, found very limited damage, while residents reported a “hellish noise” and bright lights that night.

According to military experts, this first launch may not have contained an explosive charge and may have been carried out by Moscow as a demonstration for political purposes.

Reports this Sunday from Bila Tserkva, a town about 80 kilometers south of Kiev, suggested that locals had seen the missile hit the area. The Ukrainian Air Force confirmed the missile was used in the attack.

Although the damage was limited, for the Ukrainians, the repeated use of the missile represents a normalization of an apocalyptic weapon in Russia's nuclear arsenal, writes the New York Times.

Political tool

The missile, analysts said, is being used as a political tool rather than an effective weapon.

It was launched overnight in the wake of Russia's setbacks on the battlefield, including Ukraine's attack on Moscow last week.

The peace negotiations initiated by the Americans have not yet brought concrete results, and Washington has signaled that it wants to withdraw from the role of mediator.

The Kremlin has repeatedly said it wants the entire Donbas region and for Ukraine to recognize Russian control over the occupied regions, conditions Kiev rejects.

Meanwhile, Moscow's advance on the battlefield slowed, and Ukrainian drones began killing more and more Russians.

A study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank, predicted that to continue the war with Ukraine, the Kremlin would have to resort to unpopular measures, including further partial mobilization, closing borders, suspending the last post-Soviet civil liberties and moving to a Soviet-style managed economy.

Otherwise, the study's author noted, the Kremlin will be forced to scale back its war aims.