Credit: Telegram / dnepr_operativ
Russia fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at Ukraine for the first time early on Thursday morning, Kyiv’s air force has said.
It said the missile hit Dnipro, in southern Ukraine, a few minutes after being fired from a site in Astrakhan, by the Caspian Sea.
A defence source later told Ukrainian media that the missile was an RS-26 Rubezh, which Kyiv believes Moscow fired in response to Ukraine firing Western-made missiles into Russia.
The missile was reportedly fired as part of a wider attack on Dnipro, which Ukraine said injured two people and sparked fires in an industrial area. A rehabilitation centre for people with disabilities was damaged and a fire broke out at a residential building, emergency services said.
“From early morning, the aggressor massively attacked the region,” Sergei Lysak, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration, said in a statement.
Firefighters work at the scene of the Russian strike on Dnipro – Press Service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Anadolu via Getty Images
People examine the damage done by the Russian strike on Dnipro – Mykola Synelnykov/Reuters
The RS-26 is classified as an ICBM under a nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia, but can be seen as an intermediate-range ballistic missile when used with heavier payloads at ranges below 5,500 km, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said.
But Western missile experts have cast doubt on whether an ICBM was launched by Russia.
Andrey Baklitskiy, a weapons of mass destruction senior researcher at the United Nations, pointed out that Moscow did not inform Washington of the launch 24 hours in advance, as is custom.
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Mr Baklitskiy. “If true, this will be totally unprecedented and the first actual military use of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Not that it makes a lot of sense, given their price and precision.”
The RS-26 Rubezh weighs 50 tonnes and carries a warhead three times larger than the Iskander missiles.
The missile has been described as being in an “experimental” phase, given that it has barely been test fired. It can fly at five times the speed of sound, which makes it hard for the Patriot missile systems that guard Kyiv to shoot down.
Pavel Podvig, also a weapons of mass destruction senior researcher at the UN, said Russia mothballed its RS-26 Rubezh missiles in 2018.
“One cannot rule out that RS-26 was taken out of its ‘retirement’ for a strike,” he added. “This implies that Russia had a number of these missiles in storage for almost 10 years. Not impossible, but rather unlikely.”
The Kremlin has not officially commented, but Russia’s foreign ministry spokesman received a phone call during a live press briefing on Thursday ordering her not to comment on reports of a ballistic missile strike.
“Masha,” an unknown male voice said on the phone, addressing spokeswoman Maria Zakharova using a nickname for Maria, “on the Yuzhmash ballistic missile strike that the Westerners have started talking about, we are not commenting at all.”
Yuzhmash refers to a Ukrainian rocket manufacturer in Dnipro.
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