By Tom Balmforth and Gerry Doyle
KYIV (Reuters) – A new ballistic missile fired by Russia at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last week carried multiple nuclear warheads but no explosives and caused limited damage, two senior Ukrainian government sources said.
Their comments appeared to confirm the Kremlin's own description of the weapon's use last Thursday as a warning to the West after the United States and Britain allowed Ukraine to fire their missiles at Russia.
Trusted news and daily treats, straight to your inbox
See for yourself: The Yodel is the source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories.
The two sources provided more details about the new weapon as Western experts try to learn more about what US officials said was an experimental intermediate-range missile.
Intermediate-range ballistic missiles are typically intended for long-range nuclear strikes against targets thousands of miles away.
One of the sources said the missile was carrying dummy warheads and described the damage caused as “fairly minor”.
The second source said: “In this case (the missile) was without explosives… There were no types of explosions as we expected. There was something, but it was not huge.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile attack was a successful test and that it had achieved its target: a missile and defense venture in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Ukraine has rarely released information about airstrikes on military targets since the Russian invasion of February 2022.
Putin also said Russia would continue to test the Oreshnik in combat and that it had a stockpile ready to use. Kiev has said Ukraine is already working on developing aerial systems to counter the weapon.
U.S. officials have said Russia likely possesses only a handful of these missiles, which Western experts say appear to be derived from the RS-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Leaving out the explosives in a 'reentry vehicle' – the heat-protected part of the missile that carries the warhead – leaves room for instrumentation, which countries testing missile designs can use to measure performance, experts say.
It is not publicly known whether the Russian warheads carried such equipment.
The RS-26 has a reported range of more than 5,000 km (3,100 mi), although the missile that struck Ukraine from Russia's Astrakhan region only flew about 700 km.
“I would say this is an incredibly expensive way to probably not cause that much destruction,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth in Kiev and Gerry Doyle in Singapore, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
