Ukraine was forced to relocate some of its missile production facilities outside of the country due to the threat of long-range Russian strikes, Aleksey Danilov, the head of the National Security and Defense Council, has said.
In an interview with Spanish newspaper ABC published on Tuesday, Danilov was asked to comment on the progress of Ukraine’s efforts to produce missiles. He refused to go into much detail, explaining that “it is a closed program, and no one will tell you what status it is in.”
Danilov added, however, that “unfortunately, Russia hit the place where these missiles were assembled.”
“Now we have moved a certain part of the production outside our country,” he stated, without revealing the exact location, or which assets have been relocated.
His comments come after the Russian Defense Ministry said that between September 17 and 23, Moscow’s forces had conducted a total of 12 high-precision and drone strikes on a wide range of Ukrainian military targets. Among other facilities, ammunition depots and sites storing high-precision weapons were hit, officials said.
The Russian attacks followed an announcement by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in late August, when he claimed that Kiev had successfully used a weapon with a range of 700km. Danilov confirmed the development, sharing a clip of what looked like a missile being launched into the night.
“Sevastopol is waiting, Kamchatka is waiting, Kronstadt is waiting,” he said at the time, apparently hinting at Kiev’s intention to use the missiles to hit targets deep into Russian territory.
While Danilov has pledged that Ukraine will not use Western-supplied long-range weapons to attack facilities inside Russia, he signaled that this does not apply to domestically produced arms. “It is our job to hit with our own weapons the military facilities of the Russian Federation,” he told ABC, insisting that Kiev would not attack the civilian population.
However, in recent months, Ukraine has significantly ramped up its long-range drone raids, with some of them targeting civilian buildings in Moscow in what Russia has described as “terrorist attacks.”