An evaluation by the United States intelligence services has concluded that Russia could again use its new lethal intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine in the “coming days”a US official reported Wednesday.
He misil experimental Oreshnik is seen by US officials more as a intimidation attempt that as a game-changer on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information.
The official said that Russia only has a handful of the missiles and they carry a smaller warhead than other missiles. that Russia has regularly launched at Ukraine.
Russia first fired the weapon in a Nov. 21 missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Surveillance video of the attack showed huge fireballs streaking through the darkness and crashing to the ground at astonishing speed.
A few hours after the attack on the military installation, the Russian President Vladimir Putin took the rare step of speaking on national television to boast about the new hypersonic missile. It warned the West that its next use could be against Ukrainian NATO allies allowing kyiv to use its longer-range missiles to attack inside Russia.
The attack occurred two days after Putin to sign revised version of Russian nuclear doctrine that lowered the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. The doctrine allows for a possible nuclear response by Moscow even in the face of a conventional attack against Russia by any nation supported by a nuclear power.
This attack also occurred shortly after President Joe Biden will agree to relax restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range weapons American-made to strike deeper into Russian territory.
“We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against the military installations of countries that allow their weapons to be used against our installations,” Putin said at the time.
The Pentagon said that the Oreshnik was an experimental type of intermediate-range ballistic missileor IRBM, based on the Russian intercontinental ballistic missile RS-26 Rubezhor ICBM. The attack marked the first time such a weapon had been used in war.
Intermediate range missiles can fly between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is pressing Putin to act to reach an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine, describing it as part of his active efforts as president-elect to end the war.
“Zelensky and Ukraine would like to reach an agreement and stop the madness”Trump wrote on social media last weekend, referring to Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky.
(With information from AP)
