After warning U.S. officials of its intention to launch, Russia lobbed a mysterious new ballistic missile at the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine early Thursday morning, damaging buildings and injuring potentially dozens of people.
Initially mistaken for a 3,400-mile intercontinental ballistic missile, minus the nuclear warheads for its six independent reentry vehicles, the mystery weapon turned out to be something else: an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM.
Its name, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is “Oreshnik.” That’s Russian for “hazelnut tree.”
Sabrina Singh, the Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary, described the Oreshnik as a variant of Russia’s RS-26 ballistic missile. The RS-26 is a 40-ton, solid-fueled missile that straddles two treaty categories.
Depending on the angle at which it’s fired, the RS-26 could travel slightly more than 3,400 miles. That would make it an ICBM. But it’s more comfortably an IRBM that ranges fewer than 3,400 miles.
The problem for the RS-26’s designers was that, until 2019, the United States and Russia were both party to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned the testing and deployment of missiles traveling between 310 and 3,400 miles.
Capable of carrying a nuclear payload and also capable of striking with minimal warning, IRBMs are uniquely destabilizing—hence the treaty. But Russia secretly continued developing missiles in this category, ultimately prompting the United States to quit the INF regime—over some objections from arms-control advocates—in 2019. Russia soon followed suit.
To avoid openly violating the INF Treaty during pre-2019 testing, the Russians angled the RS-26 to lob it just past the 3,400-mile treaty threshold—even though the missile’s design favored intermediate rather than intercontinental range.
That the new Oreshnik is apparently a version of the RS-26 underscores that the former isn’t necessarily an ICBM—and the latter almost certainly isn’t one. Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said the Oreshnik is “kind of funny” owing to its convoluted origins.
No one is actually laughing, of course. Putin clearly ordered his forces to launch the Oreshnik at Dnipro in retaliation for Ukraine’s own deep strikes targeting arms depots and command posts in western Russia. The United States, the United Kingdom and France recently authorized Ukraine to use its best American, British and French munitions in those strikes.
Targeting civilians with a powerful, multiple-warhead ballistic missile represents “a clear and severe escalation in the scale and brutality of this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated.
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