Putin compares Russia’s new missile to meteorite

The strike power of Russia’s new state-of-the-art Oreshnik ballistic missile is similar to a meteorite impact, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. The hypersonic weapon is capable of successfully hitting heavily fortified targets, he added. 

Moscow already has several such missiles at its disposal and has begun mass production of the advanced weapon system, Putin told a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana.

“This is like a falling meteorite. We know from history where meteorites had fallen and what the consequences were. What lakes were formed,” the Russian leader said. 

Putin did not elaborate, although one of the world’s largest impact crater lakes – Lake Manicouagan in Canada – has a multiple-ring structure with a diameter amounting to some 100km. Its inner ring diameter is around 70km.

The Oreshnik system also has dozens of homing warheads capable of hitting targets while traveling ten times faster than the speed of sound, Putin stated. 

A massive strike with such missiles would be comparable to a nuclear blast, he added. “Anything located in the strike center is obliterated into elemental particles, reduced to dust,” the president said.

The Russian military is selecting targets for potential Oreshnik strikes, Putin warned. The system could be used in retaliation against the “Kiev regime” if Ukrainian attacks against Russia using Western-provided long-range missiles and data continue, he added.   

These targets could include Ukrainian “decision-making centers” as well as military and industrial facilities, Putin stated. Last week, Russia deployed the Oreshnik missile system to strike a large weapons factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk (also known as Dnepr in Ukraine), as part of what was called a combat test. According to Putin, the strike was a response to “aggressive actions of NATO members” who back Kiev.

The Ukrainian military has recently launched several strikes against targets in Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk regions, using US-made ATACMS as well as British-French Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles. On Monday, Washington confirmed that it had lifted range restrictions on the use of ATACMS by Kiev’s troops. Paris had earlier confirmed that it would allow Ukraine to use SCALP missiles at their maximum range. 

Speaking at the CSTO summit on Thursday, Putin said Moscow’s weapons are superior in several aspects to Western-made missiles. Russia is also producing much more of them than the entire NATO bloc, he stated. The Oreshnik in particular “has no counterparts in the world, of course, and I believe none will appear anytime soon,” the president added.