STORY: On Nov. 21 Russia struck Ukraine’s Dnipro with a new kind of missile.
Known as Oreshnik, or hazel tree in Russia, it caused limited damage, according to senior officials.
But the first combat use of such a design – which Russian President Vladimir Putin called unstoppable – has drawn scrutiny from Western military experts.
An examination by two such experts of the debris recovered from the new intermediate-range ballistic missile – or IRBM – shows how it dropped multiple payloads across the target area.
Jeffrey Lewis is the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.
“And so the ballistic missile launches and takes everything up into space. And the first stage falls away, and then the second rocket motor falls away. And then you just have the bus kind of drifting in space.”
:: Source: Areas of control from the ISW with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project
Lewis said the largest pieces of debris were part of its warhead bus.
The other large section of wreckage contained guidance, fuel tanks and other electronics, he said.
The bus allows for multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles – or MIRVs – each of which carries a warhead and can hit a separate mark.
“As the thing goes through space, those thrusters will fire to turn the bus so that it can drop warheads in different locations. And that’s basically what we saw is the bus carried probably six warheads and each of those six warheads carried six submunitions. So what you saw were six different sets of six little missiles striking the base, and they each went to slightly different places. And that’s because the bus was able to maneuver and drop them in different spots.”
The missile was derived from the RS-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Lewis said the new design had most likely removed a booster stage from the RS-26, reducing its range.
:: November 21, 2024
After the missile strike Putin said the Oreshnik was hypersonic and could not be intercepted.
:: Russian Defence Ministry
But Lewis and other experts noted that all ballistic missiles of that range are hypersonic, and that some missile interceptors from Israel and the U.S. were designed to destroy them.
“And again, you know, people are making a big deal about this thing going three and a half kilometers per second, and ICBM fired to its full range, you know, will travel at like seven kilometers a second. So like twice that speed.”
:: November 21, 2024
Senior Ukrainian officials told Reuters that the missile used to attack Dnipro carried no explosives and caused little damage… though Lewis said the sheer speed of reentry was enough to cause damage.
:: November 21, 2024
:: Russian Defence Ministry
In an address after the missile’s launch, Putin said it was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with U.S. and British missiles… and warned the war could be escalating toward a global conflict.
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Lewis said Russia’s use of this type of missile might be a psychological tactic more than a military one.
“You know, if the weapon were inherently terrifying, he (Putin) would just use it. But that’s not quite enough. He’s had to use it and then he had to do a press conference and then he had to do a second press conference to say, hey, this thing is really scary.”
