By Tom Balmforth and Gerry Doyle
KYIV (Reuters) – A new missile fired by Russia at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last week carried multiple warheads but no explosives, and caused minimal damage, two Ukrainian government officials said.
His comments seemed to confirm the Kremlin’s explanation for the use of the weapon last Thursday as a warning to the West after the United States and Britain allowed Ukraine to fire its weapons into Russia.
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The two sources provided more information about the new weapon as Western experts try to learn more about what US officials say was a test medium-range missile.
Intermediate-range missiles are generally intended for use in long-range nuclear strikes on targets thousands of kilometers away.
One of the sources said the gun was carrying dummy warheads and described the damage caused as “minor”.
The second article said: “In this case, (the missile) had no explosives… There was no kind of explosion as we expected. There was something, but it was not big.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile test was successful and that it hit its target – an arms and defense business in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Ukraine has not released information about airstrikes on military targets from Russia until February 2022.
Putin also said that Russia will continue to test the Oreshnik in combat and that it has a stock ready for use. Kyiv said Ukraine is already working on developing anti-missile defense systems.
US officials have said Russia may have a few of these weapons, which Western experts say appear to be derived from the RS-26 medium-range ballistic missile.
Leaving the explosives in the “re-entry vehicle” – the heavily-protected part of the missile that carries the warhead – leaves room for instruments, which countries testing artificial intelligence can use to measure performance, experts say.
It is not publicly known whether the Russian military carries such gear.
The RS-26 has a stated range of more than 5,000 km (3100 miles) although the missile that hit Ukraine from the Russian region of Astrakhan region flew only about 700 km.
“I would say this is a very cost-effective way to deliver what is probably not going to be very destructive,” 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 Kyiv and Gerry Doyle in Singapore, Editing by Timothy Heritage)