Putin Rattles Nuclear Saber With Unprecedented Strike on Ukraine

Russia’s unprecedented use of a massive ballistic missile against a city in central Ukraine is a message to Kyiv and its allies, and shows the war is escalating in unpredictable ways with just two months left in the Biden administration.

In the early morning on Thursday, Russia struck Dnipro, an industrial city on the Dnieper River, with a weapon that has not previously been seen in nearly three years of war.

Incoming President-elect Donald Trump has promised to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, and members of his team have said they are willing to force Kyiv to cede occupied land to Moscow and cut off military support to reach a deal. The attack signals an effort by the Kremlin to limit room for maneuver by President Joe Biden, who has authorized the use of key U.S. weapons systems by Ukraine — including tactical missiles and anti-personnel mines — in the hope of shoring up its defensive capabilities ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

“Russia struck the Yuzhmash plant [a munitions manufacturer] in Dnipro city with a non-nuclear hypersonic ballistic missile, ‘Oreshnik,’” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address. He also left the door open for strikes outside Ukraine: “Russia considers itself entitled to use weapons against facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against Russian facilities.”

While Putin’s statement is ambiguous, his message is clear: If allies continue to arm Ukraine, the conflict involving a nuclear power could spin out of control, and Russia might feel compelled to attack the U.S. or a NATO member.

Videos of the strike in Dnipro show a series of six clusters of munitions breaking through the clouds over Dnipro on a rapid ballistic trajectory.

“Today, there was a new Russian rocket,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address from his official account on the messaging service Telegram. “Today, our crazy neighbor once again showed what he really is and how he despises dignity, freedom, and people’s lives in general.”

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Zelensky said that the military’s analysis of the characteristics of the weapon, including its speed and the altitude it reached on its trajectory, indicated it was an intercontinental ballistic missile.

There is no previous record of a Russian missile dubbed “Oreshnik,” and it is common for the Kremlin to intentionally muddy the waters over its weapons systems and capabilities. According to initial analysis by military analysts who spoke to Rolling Stone, the weapon used appears to have been some version of an RS-26 Rubezh ballistic missile — a 40-ton solid-fuel multi-stage missile carrying multiple re-entry vehicles, which reaches velocities in excess of 20 times the speed of sound and is capable of striking thousands of miles from its launch point.

The RS-26 is designed to carry out nuclear attacks. The weapon used against Dnipro appears to have carried multiple warheads with conventional explosives.

While it may seem like splitting hairs to worry about which specific type of missile was used against a civilian population center, it can be important both for understanding capabilities and also in terms of messaging. Because of some uncertainty about the RS-26 and its derivatives, experts debate whether it should be classified as an intermediate-range or intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This technical debate is based on the range of the weapon — there is data that the RS-26 is capable of reaching up to 5,800 kilometers (3,600 miles), which surpasses the 5,500-kilometer range used to define an ICBM in some international nuclear disarmament treaties.

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That has relevance to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, an anti-proliferation agreement from which the U.S. withdrew in 2019 over allegations Russia was not complying with a prohibition of developing missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km — including the RS-26. In response, Russia also withdrew from the treaty.

A correspondent for Reuters reported that U.S. officials believe the weapon was an intermediate-range missile, and not an ICBM. If Russia had used an ICBM, the Kremlin would have been required to notify Washington of the launch in advance, under a treaty governing strategic nuclear weapons, known as New START.

As a general principle, most national security professionals agree it is suboptimal for the leaders of nuclear powers to be surprised and uncertain whether a missile launched by an adversary carries a nuclear warhead or not.

The White House also has cause to downplay the issue. The strike comes after it was reported earlier this week that Biden had authorized Ukraine to use American-supplied tactical missiles, known as ATACMS, against targets inside Russia for the first time since the start of the conflict in 2022.

Putin addressed the decision obliquely: “The conflict in Ukraine has signs of a global war after attacks with long-range Western-made missiles on Russia, because they cannot be launched without the help of manufacturers.”

But there are indeed undisputed “signs of a global war.” Biden’s ATACMS move was said to be made in response to the deployment of around 10,000 North Korean soldiers to Russia, where they have joined a counteroffensive aimed at ejecting Ukrainian forces from the border province of Kursk. Ukraine had long sought authorization to use these missiles, with a range of 200 miles, against targets in Russia to support their offensive in Kursk, and by Tuesday, it was already using them.

Although many of Ukraine’s supporters celebrated Biden’s decision, ATACMS are not seen as a game-changer by military professionals, although they do add a useful offensive capability.

“ATACMS can create favorable military conditions. We disrupted logistics by destroying ammo dumps and bridges in Kursk, destroyed C2 [command and control] nodes, hit a couple battalions — that created an operational window. Okay, what’s next? Who is going to exploit it?” one Ukrainian military source tells Rolling Stone. “The setbacks that Ukraine has aren’t caused by targets which can be neutralized with ATACMS.”

In response to the ATACMS authorization, Putin on Tuesday announced a change to his country’s nuclear doctrine, saying a conventional attack by a non-nuclear power with “the participation or support of a nuclear power” would be seen as a “joint attack,” and that Russia reserved the right to a nuclear response. 

While Putin has long made a point of highlighting Russia’s nuclear capabilities in response to military aid supplied to Ukraine by the United States and its NATO allies, Moscow is ratcheting up its rhetoric about nuclear war.

“Russia’s new nuclear doctrine means NATO missiles fired against our country could be deemed an attack by the bloc on Russia,” former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Tuesday. “Russia could retaliate with WMD against [Kyiv] and key NATO facilities, wherever they’re located. That means World War III.”

That nuclear saber rattling was accompanied by a flood of messages on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which has become a clearinghouse for Russian talking points. It was also echoed by Republican lawmakers, who criticized Biden’s decision to authorize ATACMS as “counterproductive” to Trump’s “stated goal towards a negotiated peace.”

“Your recent actions seem to be pushing the world closer to the brink of nuclear war,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to the president. “Americans do not want World War III.”

Analysts note that the strike on Dnipro with the missile, whatever type it may have been, was telegraphed well in advance.

Foreign embassies across Kyiv shuttered their doors and halted operations on Wednesday, with the U.S. embassy issuing a statement that it expected a “significant air attack.”

“Don’t ignore the air alarm. Especially today,” warned Boryslav Bereza, a former parliamentarian from the far-right party Right Sector, ahead of the strike. “The enemy plans to launch an attack from the Kapustin Yar range (Astrakhan region) with an experimental medium-range ballistic missile, probably the RS-26 Rubezh missile, at an unspecified target on the territory of Ukraine.”

The attack, while unprecedented and escalatory, does not necessarily indicate a new capability. Strategic missiles designed to carry nuclear warheads are not especially accurate, and can only be used against large-area targets like population centers. Notably, officials in Dnipro report no one was killed in the missile strike earlier today. Compare that to a large, widespread strike of more than 200 missiles and drones launched against Ukrainian cities that happened early on Monday, killing and wounding dozens, and inflicting such heavy damage on energy infrastructure that rolling blackouts were implemented across the country.

Putin, in his televised address, promised to “notify civilians” in advance when weapons like the “Oreshnik” will be launched again.

The real reason for the use of the missile was to reinforce “brink of nuclear war” psychological operations (psyops), a U.S. military source with expertise in the region tells Rolling Stone: “If you’re so short of capability that you have to waste a strategic resource on a tactical psyop, it seems kinda desperate.”

The source continues: “If the message is, ‘We’re running so short of conventional IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missiles] that we’re buying knock-offs from Iran and retro-Frankenstein’ing our top-of-the-line ICBMs to deliver a conventional payload at one-tenth their max range,’ then… cool?”

Military analysts also question whether the strike indicates we are on a march to nuclear war.

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“There aren’t that many benefits for Russia to use nuclear weapons. We don’t have any concentration of forces that would result in catastrophic damage to units. Killing one battalion with a nuke is irrational from a military standpoint,” one Ukrainian analyst, who asked not to be named because of their role handling sensitive information, tells Rolling Stone. “They won’t use strategic weapons either, because that’s a whole different can of worms… The risks are too high while the benefits are dubious.”

“I disagree with the assessment that Putin is an irrational actor,” says the analyst. “He is rational, it’s just that his rationale is built on incorrect assessments of Ukraine prior to invasion.”