Vladimir Putin’s ‘unstoppable’ new hypersonic missile struck Russian targets in a humiliating blunder, experts believe.
A £40million Oreshnik missile, which sends its six warheads into its marks at 10 times the speed of sound, crashed into targets in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of Ukraine.
The missile, which researchers from the Institute for the Study of War say was launched at around 1am on May 24, is believed to have severely malfunctioned when it was fired from Russia’s Kapustin Yar test site.
Though its intended target is not known, video footage appears to show the missile’s warheads hitting several targets in occupied territory.
These targets include the Rose Park shopping mall in territory occupied by Russian forces.
On top of this, the Oreshnik’s warheads are believed to have hit the heavily-contested Ukrainian towns of Avdiivka and Yasynuvata, which sit 25 miles behind Russian lines.
It was one of two missiles that were fired from the site that day. The other hit its target in Bila Tserkva near Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv.
The Oreshnik, which Russia first used against Ukraine in 2024, is a nuclear-capable missile with a range of over 3,100 miles.
Combat vehicles in Belarus carrying the Oreshnik missile system
The Oreshnik missile is believed to have severely malfunctioned when it was fired from Russia’s Kapustin Yar test site (File image)
Putin has said the Oreshnik is impossible to intercept, though many Western experts have questioned that assertion.
But a Russian Oreshnik missile fired at Ukraine in January appears to have been made nine years ago and contains only Russian and Belarusian components, Ukrainian experts said on Friday after examining fragments of a weapon Russia claims is a game-changer.
Debris recovered from the small number of Oreshnik missiles fired by Russia during its war in Ukraine has helped Kyiv to learn more about the weapon – and to question some of the hype around it.
Ukrainian authorities assess the Oreshnik to be a modernised version of the older RS-26 Rubezh missile which was first successfully test-launched in 2012.
At a presentation of electronics recovered from Russian missiles and drones, a Ukrainian missile forensics expert said on Friday that the Oreshnik recovered in January had been assembled in 2017 from components dating to 2016 or earlier, all of them made in Russia or its ally Belarus.
‘We were rather surprised, because they say that this is a very new missile, but if you look at the year of assembly, it says 2017,’ said the expert, who identified himself only as Petro for security reasons.
Russia has struck Ukrainian territory with the Oreshnik at least three times during the war, including a town near Kyiv during a heavy air assault on May 24.
Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s sanctions adviser, said the surviving electronics were recovered from an Oreshnik that hit the western city of Lviv in January.
Vlasiuk said the missile debris from the latest Oreshnik strike this month was still being studied.
He also said that Ukrainian investigators were observing a greater degree of substitution of western missile components for Chinese ones, which Vlasiuk said appeared to be a ‘forced’ substitution.
Although Ukraine’s Western allies have restricted the export of electronics which could be used in missiles to Russia, Western chips supplied through illicit means are still often found in Russian missiles and drones.
Ukraine has long put pressure on Western countries to toughen enforcement against electronic component flows to Moscow.
Overnight, Russian drones killed one person and wounded two dozen others in cities across Ukraine, as Kyiv and Moscow step up long-range strikes with peace talks stalling.
One person was killed in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson and eight people were wounded in the northern town of Chernigiv, where power was cut to 10,000 people, authorities said.
Emergency services published images from Chernigiv showing teams of firefighters dousing a large blaze in the middle of the night following the attacks.
The Ukrainian air force said Russian forces had launched 265 combat drones in the barrage, and that its air defence units had downed 228 of the unmanned aerial vehicles.
Seven people were wounded in Russian strikes in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, four more in the city of Kharkiv, one in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia and at least two more were hurt in Kherson.
Moscow launches attacks almost nightly on Ukraine, which has stepped up its retaliatory strikes in recent months, mainly targeting Russian energy infrastructure.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022 has become the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions.
