In response to a U.S. decision to arrange for ballistic missile attacks from Ukraine into Russia, the great magician and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin pulled a rabbit from his hat.
Yesterday the six independent war heads of a new intermediate range ballistic missile hit the Yuzhmash missile plant in Dnipro Ukraine.
Until now the new missile and its mission profile had been unknown. It is the clear counter to decade long efforts of the U.S. to gain supremacy, especially in Europe, over Russia.
Missiles can be classified by the range they are able to achieve:
- Short-Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBM) are designed to target enemy forces within a range of approximately 1,000 kilometers. Typically employed in tactical scenarios, they allow for rapid response to regional threats.
- Medium-Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBM) extend the operational range to about 3,500 kilometers. These systems enhance a nation’s deterrent capabilities by allowing strikes on targets further away without resorting to intercontinental systems.
- Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) represent the longest range category, with capabilities exceeding 5,500 kilometers. These missiles serve as a strategic deterrent, capable of delivering payloads across continents and significantly impacting global security dynamics.
The U.S., Russia and China have developed all three types of weapons. In the late 1980s, on the initiative of the Soviet leader Mikhail Grobaschev, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty):
The INF Treaty banned all of the two nations’ nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–1,000 kilometers (310–620 mi) (short medium-range) and 1,000–5,500 km (620–3,420 mi) (intermediate-range). The treaty did not apply to air- or sea-launched missiles. By May 1991, the nations had eliminated 2,692 missiles, followed by 10 years of on-site verification inspections.
While the deployment of missiles of a certain range were prohibited missile development continued. Around 2008 the Russian Federation used the base design of the RS-24 (Yars) intercontinental missile to develop a more flexible version with a lighter payload. The result was the easier to handle RS-26 missile. While this could and did achieve the range needed to be classified as an intercontinental missile its payload was too small to be really effective.
In early 2018 the Russian Federation decided to halt all further development of the RS-26 and invested its money into the more promising hypersonic glide vehicle Avanguard.
A few month after Russia had taken the decision to mothball the RS-24 development the U.S. withdrew from the INF-treaty. While the U.S. claimed that certain cruise missile developments in Russia were in breach of the treaty the real reason for the withdrawal was elsewhere:
[T]he US need to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, including within South China Sea, was another reason for their move to withdraw, because China was not a signatory to the treaty. US officials extending back to the presidency of Barack Obama have noted this.
However the U.S. withdrawal from the INF aligned with the 2002 withdrawal of the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which had limited missile defenses. Shortly thereafter the U.S. announced to build ‘anti missile installations’ in eastern Europe. These installation can be easily re-purposed to fire offensive cruise missiles towards Russia.
In July 2024 NATO announced that the U.S. would, starting in 2026, deploy nuclear capable intermediate range missiles in Germany.
This would recreated the dangerous situation Europe had seen before the INF treaty was put into place. A nuclear war within Europe, without the involvement of the continental U.S., will again become a possibility.
Russia had to finally react to the threat. A few weeks after the NATO announcement Vladimir Putin responded to those plans:
The US administration and the German government made a noteworthy statement concerning their plans to deploy US long-range precision missile systems in Germany in 2026.
The missiles could reach ranges of major Russian state and military facilities, administrative and industrial centres, and defence infrastructure. The flight time to targets on our territory of such missiles, which in the future may be equipped with nuclear warheads, would be about ten minutes.
The United States has already conducted exercises to practice deployment of Typhon missile systems from its territory to Denmark and the Philippines. This situation is reminiscent of the events of the Cold War related to the deployment of American medium-range Pershing missiles in Europe.
If the United States implements these plans, we will consider ourselves free from the previously assumed unilateral moratorium on the deployment of medium and shorter-range strike weapons, including increasing the capabilities of the coastal troops of our Navy.
Today, the development of such systems in Russia is nearing completion. We will take mirror measures to deploy them, taking into account the actions of the United States, its satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.
Yesterday’s attack on the Yuzhmash complex in Dnepropetrovsk (video) was the first demonstration of the new Russian capability.
The new missiles, named Oreshnik (hazel), is a RS-26 variant with a shorter range and a payload of six (instead of the previously four) multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV). Each reentry vehicle can carry six sub-munitions. The payload can be inert, destroying the target by the shear power of its kinetic energy, high-explosive or nuclear.
The missile uses solid fuel and is road mobile. It can be fired on short notice from camouflaged positions.
Launched from Russia the missile can reach any target in Europe in less than 20 minutes. On reentry into the atmosphere the warheads of the missile reach hypersonic speeds of 3-4 kilometer per second. There is no air defense system in the world that could stop them.
The surprising and successful demonstration of such an enormous capability is a wake-up call for European strategists.
Lulled in by neoconservative talk of western supremacy and presumed Russian inabilities the Europeans were eager to connect their fate to a proxy war against Russia. Having been defeated in the fight for the commodities of the Donbas region they have pushed for extending the reach of their weapons into Russia.
The results are now in. Europe is defenseless against new Russian weapons which can reach every political and industrial center of Europe with devastating power and with just minutes of notice.
Luckily there is still time to change course.
While announcing the new capabilities the Russian president also made an offer (video) to limit their deployment:
We are developing intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. We believe that the United States made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext. Today, the United States is not only producing such equipment, but, as we can see, it has worked out ways to deploy its advanced missile systems to different regions of the world, including Europe, during training exercises for its troops. Moreover, in the course of these exercises, they are conducting training for using them.
As a reminder, Russia has voluntarily and unilaterally committed not to deploy intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles until US weapons of this kind appear in any region of the world.
To reiterate, we are conducting combat tests of the Oreshnik missile system in response to NATO’s aggressive actions against Russia. Our decision on further deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles will depend on the actions of the United States and its satellites.
Should the U.S. and its European lackeys commit further offenses against Russia, more severe Oreshnik ‘tests’, under field conditions and potentially aiming at targets beyond Ukraine, will be pursued:
We will determine the targets during further tests of our advanced missile systems based on the threats to the security of the Russian Federation. We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against military facilities of those countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities, and in case of an escalation of aggressive actions, we will respond decisively and in mirror-like manner. I recommend that the ruling elites of the countries that are hatching plans to use their military contingents against Russia seriously consider this.
Let’s hope they will do so.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.
