11 minutes to Berlin, 14 minutes to Brussels, 19 minutes to London: Russia’s new hypersonic medium range ballistic missile shows what it can do
Tonight’s edition of the news and analysis program Sixty Minutes hosted by Duma member Yevgeny Popov and his wife Olga Skabeyeva was almost entirely devoted to coverage of the country’s latest hypersonic missile “Oreshkin,” which has a range of more than 5,000 km, putting it at the outer limits of Intermediate Range and lower limits of Intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Oreshkin was used yesterday in an unprecedented strike on industrial facilities in the Ukrainian city of Dnepr (Dnipro in Ukrainian), a city of one million inhabitants, fourth largest in Ukraine and the capital of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast.
The program consisted of the following segments:
1. A detailed explanation of the distinguishing characteristics of Oreshkin, including its speed and the reasons for its invulnerability to all known air defense system, its time in flight to major European capitals, and more. In yesterday’s attack, the six MIRVd warheads were conventional but devastating due to speed-related initial force. It was noted that the Oreshkin flew at Mach 10, i.e. 12,000 km per hour, or twice the speed of America’s Patriot interceptors and four times the speed of ATACMS or the British Storm Shadow. It is also highly maneuverable in flight making its evasion of all would-be interceptors a certainty.
2. Lengthy video clips of American and European mainstream media reports on the Oreshkin and the attack on Dnipro. Note that these directed attention at the military significance of this new Russian offensive weapon for the correlation of forces on the ground in Ukraine, which as the Russians point out was not at all what yesterday’s experiment was about.
3. Lengthy video excerpts from Vladimir Putin’s address to the nation announcing the missile attack on Dnipro and saying that the United States was automatically forewarned a half hour before the missile launch from Astrakhan using the nuclear attack preventive informational channels set up for the New Start strategic arms agreements. Most importantly Putin stressed Russia’s readiness to use this and other weapons in Russia’s arsenal against countries whose missiles are being fired at RF territory. Deciphered, he is saying that military facilities of the United States and Britain may be struck by Russian missiles if they continue the attacks on Russia which they made this past Sunday and Monday from Ukrainian territory using their ATACMS and Storm Shadow.
Indeed, in his address Vladimir Putin makes clear that yesterday’s use of the Oreshkin missile against Dnipro was a direct response to the American and British attacks. It was an unmistakable message of firm intent to respond in a mirror-image fashion to anything that Western powers may think of doing to his country. That military production facilities of Ukraine were destroyed was a useful side-effect, not the main reason.
To drive the message of absolute Russian technological superiority home, Putin emphasized that in such retaliatory attacks Russia will give advance notice to ensure that civilians have time to flee. Russia does this in the knowledge that its adversaries have no possibility of intercepting what it is sending their way.
Mr Putin stated clearly that this type of missile was created and is being deployed in answer to America’s changing strategy of intimidating its adversaries by means of short and intermediate range missiles installed and potentially fired from friendly countries in Europe and elsewhere along the periphery of the RF rather than using its nuclear triad as in the past. The USA may in this way cut flight time of its nuclear armed missiles to reach Russian cities down to ten to twenty minutes. With Oreshkin, Russia now has reduced similarly the flying time to impact in London, Berlin and Brussels.
Moscow’s expectation from today’s warning backed up by yesterday’s Oreshkin attack on the city of Dnepr is that the incoming Trump administration will not care a fig about Ukraine’s interests as it gropes for a solution to end the war and will instead pay close attention to Russia’s security concerns and demands.
Apart from the Oreshkin story, today’s edition of Sixty Minutes also was heavy on war reports from the front lines in Donbas, showing the extensive destruction of NATO tanks, armored personnel carriers and the enemy’s fortified positions using captured Ukrainian video as well as what Russian war correspondents are sending in. They showed Defense Minister Belousov saying that the Russian military has now destroyed all of Ukraine’s elite troops so that Kiev will be utterly unable to stage a counter-attack on the ground in 2025.
In summation, Russian television viewers today would have had no need to go to a cinema to see reenactments of WWII battles or other armed conflicts invented by movie producers. State television was serving up only War, War and War.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024