On November 21, just two days after Ukraine acted for the first time on U.S. permission to fire Western supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russia, Russia launched a missile attack on a military base in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The base houses the missile and space company Pivdenmash, which produces missiles, rockets, satellites and engines.
The attack included six cruise missiles and a Kinzhal hypersonic missile. There is nothing new or unusual about hitting that military target or about using those missiles. But there was something very unusual about the 9M729 Oreshnik missile that was also included in the attack.
The Oreshnik is a new intermediate range ballistic missile that has never been seen or used before. Ted Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls it an “absolutely new weapon.” Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Orseshnik “experimental” and said that the strike was a test fire.
Though intermediate range ballistic missiles like Oreshnik are typically designed to carry nuclear warheads, the missile used in this attack did not: it was armed with conventional warheads.
What is remarkable about the demonstration of the Oreshnik is that it flew at around Mach 10 or 11, making it a hypersonic missile. Unlike ordinary ballistic missiles, this one seemed to increase its range by gliding parallel to the earth during part of its flight path instead of maintaining the expected inverted U-shape ballistic trajectory.
Hypersonic missiles are very hard to hit with air defense systems. This missile may be even harder to hit because it carries six warheads each of which carries six submunitions, which means that the missile releases 36 warheads, probably with the addition of several decoys. Analysts say that each of those 36 submunitions may take a different trajectory before hitting the same target. That, and the ability of the 36 warheads to overwhelm a missile defense system, make it very hard to intercept all the warheads.
In his televised address, Putin said “There are no means of countering such weapons today.” Certainly, there are no air defense systems in Ukraine that can defend against them. Putin says that the missile defense systems deployed by the U.S. in Europe are powerless against them. Analysts suggest that most American air defense systems are not up to the challenge of the Oreshnik missile and that, those that might be, could be overwhelmed by the multiple payload, especially if the first missile was followed by a second.
Russia’s Defence Ministry says that all of the missile’s warheads hit their target, and, Putin says that after the successful operational test, the Oreshnik missile will go into serial production.
The mainstream media has reported that video evidence suggests that the missile may actually have been carrying only dummy warheads. Ukrainian authorities are investigating that possibility. Postol told me that this interpretation is not quite correct. The missiles were not dummies, but they were not armed with explosives either because they did not need to be. At the speed these submunitions are flying at, they liquify when they hit the ground and then expand rapidly. Like a meteor impact, this creates a massive explosion without the need to arm the missiles with explosives.
As the missile delivers multiple warheads, so the warheads delivered multiple messages.
The first is a response to the U.S. calling Putin’s bluff on declaring Ukraine’s firing of Western long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory with American guidance a red line. The Oreshnik missile ups the ante and shows that Russia was not bluffing.
“Putin made clear,” The New York Times tells the Wests, “that the Russian missile test was a response to those strikes.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “The main message is that the reckless decisions and actions of Western countries that produce missiles, supply them to Ukraine, and subsequently participate in strikes on Russian territory cannot remain without a reaction from the Russian side.”
Most pointedly, Putin said, “We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”
The second reason is a response to the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That treaty, signed by Gorbachev and Reagan in 1987 and negated by Donald Trump in 2019, would have rendered missiles like the Oreshnik obsolete.
When discussing the first use of the Oreshnik intermediate range ballistic missile, Putin said that “It was not Russia but the United States that destroyed the system of international security,” referring to the U.S. withdrawal from the treaty. He said that by clinging onto “hegemony,” the U.S. is “pushing the whole world toward a global conflict.”
In a televised address, Putin said, “it is a mistake on the part of the United States to destroy the system that was established by the [INF] missile treaty in 2019. We see that the United States and their allies are now considering, and have successfully tested, their capabilities to deploy advanced missile systems in different parts of the world, and their exercises routinely include the use of such systems… The use of the novel [Oreshnik] system, which was essentially an operational test, was carried out in response to the decisions made by the United States and their allies.”
And that leads into the third reason. Firing the Oreshnik missile was a response to the official U.S. opening of an air defense base in Redzikowo in northern Poland. The Aegis Ashore missile system is capable of intercepting short and intermediate range ballistic missiles. But it is also capable of firing nuclear tipped Tomahawk missiles that would take only minutes to arrive in Russia. Russia also sees it as a provocative move to weaken Russia’s nuclear deterrent potential.
The U.S. has long claimed that the missiles are not a threat to Russia and that their purpose is to intercept missiles fired from Iran. Russia has never believed that claim. Russia’s suspicion was confirmed when, at the opening ceremony, Polish President Andrzej Duda announced that “The whole world will see clearly that this is not Russia’s sphere of interest anymore.”
Russia has now added the Polish military base to its list of “priority targets for potential destruction.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called the opening of the base another step in the “decades-long destructive policy of bringing NATO military infrastructure closer to Russia’s borders.”
Peskov said that Russia would respond to the base by “adopting appropriate measures to ensure parity,” while Zakharova said that military bases like the one in Poland could be destroyed by “a wide range of the latest weapons,” a possible reference to the Oreshnik missile.
Putin seemed to specifically include the Polish base as a motivation for demonstrating the abilities of the Oreshnik missile when he said that “[m]issiles like Oreshnik are our answer to NATO’s plans to deploy medium- and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.”
Though the U.S. and its Western partners continue to make escalatory decisions on the bet that Putin is bluffing with his talk of red lines, the powerful demonstration of the Oreshnik intermediate range, hypersonic ballistic missile is a caution, once again, that the confidence behind that bet might be unfounded.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.
