Oreshnik, act 2. Russia strikes Ukraine with a ballistic missile framing it as a response to the “terrorist attack” on Putin’s residence

Overnight on January 9, the Russian army attacked Ukraine with dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones. According to Ukraine’s air force, the main direction of the strike was the Kyiv region. The mayor of the capital, Vitali Klitschko, said four people were killed and about two dozen were injured, including medics who had arrived to help the wounded. Fires broke out in dozens of buildings. The strike also damaged the building of Qatar’s embassy in Kyiv.

Klitschko said damage to critical infrastructure had left almost 6,000 homes without heating, or half the city’s housing stock, amid winter frost. Kryvyi Rih, Odesa’s seaport and the Lviv region were also struck.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the mass air attack on Ukraine on the morning of January 9. The military claimed it had hit facilities producing drones that had been used in a “terrorist attack”, as well as energy infrastructure supporting Ukraine’s military-industrial complex.

Among other things, the ministry said it had used the “Oreshnik” ballistic missile system.

The “Oreshnik” strike hit the Lviv region, local authorities said the previous evening, and no casualties were reported. Ukrainian media and Telegram channels published videos of the strike. Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said the “Oreshnik” system had been used. Ukraine’s security service later published images of debris from the ballistic missile.

Russian pro-war Telegram channels claimed the target was the Stryi gas terminal, one of the largest in Europe. The mayor of Lviv, Andrii Sadovyi, said the attack damaged a gas safety system near the village of Rudno, about 70km from the EU border.

In response to the air attack involving a ballistic missile, Ukraine called for an urgent UN meeting and tougher sanctions against Russia.

“Such a strike close to EU and NATO border is a grave threat to the security on the European continent and a test for the transatlantic community,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, wrote on Twitter.

Kaja Kallas, the European Commission vice-president, said reports of the use of “Oreshnik” were a clear escalation of the conflict and a signal to Europe and the US. “Putin doesn’t want peace, Russia’s reply to diplomacy is more missiles and destruction. This deadly pattern of recurring major Russian strikes will repeat itself until we help Ukraine break it,” Kallas said.

Russia’s Ministry of Defernse said the strikes on Ukrainian territory, including the “Oreshnik” strike, were a response to Ukraine’s alleged attack on Vladimir Putin’s Valdai residence.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, spoke about an attack on the Russian president’s residence on December 29, 2025. He said Moscow would carry out retaliatory strikes and reconsider its position on talks to end the war. Zelenskyy called Lavrov’s words “a lie”. US media, citing the CIA, reported that Ukraine had not tried to attack Putin’s Valdai residence, and that the agency believed Ukrainian drones were aimed at a military facility near the residence. Donald Trump said he did not believe the Ukrainian armed forces had tried to strike Putin’s residence.

The previous “Oreshnik” strike was carried out by Russia against the Yuzhmash plant in Dnipro on November 21, 2024. That evening, Putin delivered an address in which he said that, in response to Ukraine’s use of long-range American and British weapons, Russian forces had tested a new intermediate-range missile system, “Oreshnik”, “under combat conditions”.

The next day, at a meeting with M0D leaders, Putin added that the “Oreshnik” system had been adopted for service and that its serial production was “practically organised”. He stressed that “Oreshnik” was not a “modernisation of old Soviet systems” but the result of work by specialists from a “new Russia”. In December 2025, the defence ministry showed “Oreshnik” for the first time, with the system going on combat duty in Belarus.

The New York Times wrote that, by using “Oreshnik”, Russia was sending “a threatening message to the West”, and military analysts described the choice of missile as a warning intended to “instill fear in Kyiv and the West”.

Russia’s attack on the Yuzhmash defence plant in Dnipro was the first combat use in history of a missile with multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, known as MIRVs, wrote the Russian nuclear policy expert Maxim Starchak. But, he noted, it was not particularly important which missile Russia used. The key point, he argued, was that Moscow had shown it had a new ballistic missile, and therefore a new nuclear threat.

Editor: Mika Golubovsky