Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital Kyiv with hypersonic Oreshnik missile and drones that reportedly killed four people and injured 69.

Air defenses intercepted 549 of the drones and 55 missiles, the air force said. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had fired its nuclear-capable hypersonic Oreshnik missile and wounded 69 people in the capital in the barrage.

“Three Russian missiles against a water supply facility, a market burnt down, dozens of residential buildings damaged, several ordinary schools, and he (Putin) launched his ‘Oreshnik’ against Bila Tserkva (in central Ukraine),” Zelensky said on Telegram.

Zelensky added, “They’re really out of their minds. It’s vital that this doesn’t go unpunished for Russia.”

Russian military confirmed it had launched the Oreshnik hypersonic missile at Ukraine, saying it was “in response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure on Russian territory”.

The blasts in the capital caused a residential building near the government district to shake, while dozens of people took shelter in an underground metro station in the city center.

“Russia hit a dead-end on the battlefield, so it terrorizes Ukraine with deliberate strikes on city centers,” the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, wrote on X.

“Moscow reportedly using Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles — systems designed to carry nuclear warheads — is a political scare-tactic and reckless nuclear brinkmanship.”

French President Emmanuel Macron joined the criticism, saying the strikes signaled “the dead end of Russia’s war of aggression”.

Klitschko said damage had been recorded in every district of Kyiv, adding that a strike on a school had sparked a fire, and another on a business center had left people trapped in a shelter.

The building housing the studio of German broadcaster ARD was also damaged, the outlet said in a statement. Ukrainian authorities said Russian strikes had also wounded 12 people in the Kharkiv region, 11 in the Cherkasy region, and seven in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

Ukraine had been expecting a major attack after its own forces launched a drone barrage on Starobilsk, in the Russian-occupied east of the country, which Moscow said hit a college dormitory and killed at least 18 people.

Launched overnight on Thursday to Friday, the drone salvo — one of Ukraine’s deadliest such strikes in months — also wounded 42 in the city, located in the occupied Lugansk region.

Ukraine denied targeting civilians, saying it had hit a Russian drone unit stationed in the area. Russia’s foreign ministry said on Friday that those responsible would face “inevitable and severe punishment”.

Oreshnik Hypersonic Missile

Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of reaching targets between 3,000 and 5,500 kilometers away.

Sergei Karakayev, the commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces — which controls its nuclear arsenal and intercontinental ballistic missile program — had earlier said that Oreshnik can hit targets “throughout Europe”.

Russian President Putin claims the missile’s destructive elements can reach a temperature close to that of the Sun’s surface. “Therefore, everything in the epicenter of the explosion breaks up into fractions, into elementary particles, essentially into dust,” he had said in 2024.

He added that the missile can strike “even targets that are highly protected and located at a great depth”.

It is “impossible” for modern air defenses to intercept the Oreshnik, which attacks at a speed of Mach 10, or 2.5-3 kilometers per second, Putin had claimed.

“As with other intermediate- and intercontinental-ballistic missiles, its warheads enter the atmosphere and reach their targets at hypersonic speeds,” Marcin Andrzej Piotrowski, analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), had said earlier. in 2024.

“But unlike the hypersonic weapons, Oreshnik’s warheads did not perform any maneuvers at hypersonic speeds, which would complicate the operation of anti-missile defenses,” he added after the first attack.

Earlier, the US defense department described Oreshnik as an “experimental” missile based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh ICBM.

With AFP Inputs