Russia may be ready to use new lethal missile against Ukraine again – US

A US intelligence assessment has concluded that Russia may use its lethal new intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine again in the “coming days”, a US official said.

Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters in a briefing that an attack could be carried out “in the coming days”.

She added that the US does not consider this missile – called the Oreshnik – a game changer on the battlefield, but that the Russians are “trying to use every weapon that they have in their arsenal to intimidate Ukraine”.

She said she could not provide any other details, including where Russia may strike.

US officials said earlier Wednesday that Russia has only a handful of the missiles and that they carry a smaller warhead than other weaponry that Russia has regularly launched at Ukraine.

The threat comes as both sides work to gain a battlefield advantage in the nearly three-year war, which US President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to end, and just days after the US promised close to one billion dollars (£0.78 billion) in new security aid to Ukraine.

Other Western allies have suggested negotiations to end the war could begin this winter.

One of the officials said the US is seeing potential preparations for another launch by the end of the month or sooner. The other said in the “coming days”. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information.

The Russian Defence Ministry also suggested that Moscow is prepared to retaliate because Ukraine used six US-made ATACMS missiles to strike a military air base in Taganrog in the southern Rostov region on Wednesday, injuring soldiers.

It said two of the missiles were shot down by an air defence system and four others deflected by electronic warfare assets.

“This attack with Western long-range weapons will not be left unanswered and relevant measures will be taken,” the ministry said in a statement.

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 slamming 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 Mr 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 US President Joe Biden agreed to loosened restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American made longer-range weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory.

Mr Putin said at the time: “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.”

He also warned that the new missile could be used against other Ukrainian sites, including the government district in Kyiv, and last month said the general staff of the Russian military was selecting possible future targets, such as military facilities, defence plants or decision-making centres in Kyiv.

The Russian president declared that, “while selecting targets for strikes with such systems as Oreshnik on the territory of Ukraine, we will ask civilians and nationals of friendly countries there to leave dangerous zones in advance”.

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 310 and 3,400 miles. Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.

Mr Putin has hailed Oreshnik’s capability, saying its multiple warheads that plunge to a target at Mach 10 are immune from interception and are so powerful that the use of several of them in one conventional strike could be as devastating as a nuclear attack.

Speaking on Tuesday, Mr Putin charged that “a sufficient number of these advanced weapon systems simply makes the use of nuclear weapons almost unnecessary”.

Meanwhile, US President-elect Mr Trump is pushing Mr Putin to act to reach an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine, describing it as part of his active efforts to end the war.

“Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Mr Trump wrote on social media last weekend, referring to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.