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RIGA, Latvia — Russia fired half a dozen of its rare Kinzhal hypersonic missiles at Ukraine on Thursday, as part of a broader barrage that has killed six people and that the Russian Defense Ministry said was revenge for an incursion into western Russia last week by a far-right Russian nationalist group fighting on the side of Ukraine in the war.
But instead of impressing some of President Vladimir Putin’s hard-line critics — the pro-war advocates who have been pushing for tougher measures to defeat Ukraine for months — the Kinzhals’ deployment only raised questions about the potential waste of some of Russia’s most advanced troops on expensive weapons.
Thursday’s attack killed five people in a village in western Ukraine and a sixth person in the central Dnepropetrovsk region and wounded several others, while infrastructure strikes caused some power outages. Overall, however, the barrage did not appear to change the course of the war.
“As a result, power went out for several hours in several Ukrainian cities and trains were delayed,” noted Gray Zone, a Telegram channel linked to Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, smugly.
Around the world, Russia’s deployment of hypersonic missiles — “Kinzhal” means dagger in Russian — has sparked renewed concern about the Kremlin’s sophisticated arsenal and made it clear that Putin has hard-to-intercept, nuclear-capable weapons that the United States and its allies do not possess nor have.
Hypersonic missiles are highly maneuverable weapons, traveling at speeds in excess of Mach 5 or more than five times the speed of sound, making them extremely difficult to intercept. The United States and China are also developing hypersonic weapons. After Russia first used them in Ukraine in March last year, President Biden called the missiles “almost unstoppable.”
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Ukrainian military officials said their air defenses, including Western-supplied systems, managed to shoot down 34 cruise missiles Thursday, but admitted they were unable to intercept the Kh-47 Kinzhal missiles.
Russia has other nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons, but its display of the Kinzhal in combat is increasing pressure on Washington as a hypersonic arms race deepens, with Washington catching up with both Russia and China.
The Kinzhal is an air-launched missile based on the design of Russia’s Iskander missiles, but Moscow has been testing two other hypersonic weapons — the Avangard, a hypersonic glide vehicle fired from an ICBM reportedly in use since 2019, and the ground-launched Tsirkon, or warships and submarines that will go into production in 2021, according to the Tass news agency.
In 2018, Putin boasted that the Kinzhal had a range of about 1,250 miles and could travel at 10 times the speed of sound. “Nobody else has them anymore,” he said. In 2021, he told a military forum that the Kinzhal and other weapons were “unprecedented in terms of tactical and technical specifications. We can expect certain items to remain unmatched for a long time to come.”
Sidharth Kaushal, research associate at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said: “They are considered a primary weapon category by most major nations.” Kaushal added that hypersonic weapons are difficult to intercept because of their speed, altitude and maneuverability.
“They’re useful for some things, weighing down air defenses, hitting high-value targets, but it’s also a very expensive skill to develop,” he said. “They’re certainly not a silver bullet, but they’re a significant skill.”
Kaushal said the weapon was expensive and that Russia’s supplies of Kinzhals were likely limited, although there were no reliable estimates of how many Moscow had or how quickly it could produce them.
“Why they used the Kinzhal is an interesting question because I don’t see any obvious logic for it,” Kaushal said. “At this point, it’s quite difficult to know what the logic was behind using it against their chosen target.” Thursday’s attack fits into Moscow’s campaign to target energy assets and infrastructure, he said, but it could easily have been accomplished with other, less expensive weapons.
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Some analysts and commentators speculated that the use of the hypersonic weapons was aimed at convincing Putin’s home audience of his determination to hit hard and defeat Ukraine while preparing the nation for a protracted, heavy-duty war.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin likely used these rare missiles in unsuccessful strikes to placate the Russian pro-war and ultra-nationalist communities, who have overwhelmingly called on him to seek revenge for the March 2 incident in Bryansk Oblast,” it said the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, wrote on Thursday.
However, if that was Putin’s goal, he seemed to miss it.
Readovka Explains, a pro-Kremlin Russian propaganda channel on Telegram, complained that the “most powerful strike in recent memory” was not as devastating as some of Russia’s strikes against power plants in November, causing only limited power outages rather than a total blackout.
Yuriy Ihnat, spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, said Friday that Russia has deployed about 20 Kinzhal missiles so far since invading it a year ago and probably has about 50 of them. “It flies very fast,” Ihnat said. “That can be ascertained [but] The speed is very high.”
“The Kinzhal does not waste energy leveling up. A jet fighter lifts it up into the airflow, up into the upper layers of the atmosphere where the air is thin,” Ihnat said, referring to the lower resistance levels at very high altitudes. “It’s released into that air and the engines kick in, they take off and they fly and they’re already going at tremendous speed. It doesn’t lose speed to level up. It does not consume energy and resources. And then it flies towards its target at high speed and descends quickly.”
He said intercepting the missiles with Ukraine’s defense systems was “unrealistic”.
Andriy Yusov, spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry’s main intelligence directorate, estimated on Thursday that Russia probably had about 40 of the missiles.
However many there remain, the Kinzhals’ deployment demonstrated Moscow’s willingness to use a weapon that Ukraine cannot shoot down and that Russia could use against high-value targets in the future.
To see Russia’s secret anti-war art: Meet at a bus stop. In the dark. phones off.
The Russian Defense Ministry described Thursday’s attack as a “massive retaliatory strike” in response to Ukraine’s invasion of the Bryansk region of western Russia, which Russian authorities said killed two civilians.
A group called the Russian Volunteer Corps claimed responsibility for the incident, and its leader told the Financial Times he had tacit support from the Ukrainian authorities.
The six Kinzhals were among 81 missiles of varying sophistication and cost that Russia fired Thursday, breaching Ukraine’s air defenses and hitting power plants and infrastructure. After a series of drone strikes and the incursion last week, she has warned Ukraine about the possible consequences of attacks on Russian territory.
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Although the United States is lagging behind, it is attempting to catch up with Russia and China in building defenses against hypersonic weapons. The Pentagon’s budget request for hypersonic research is $4.7 billion in 2023, up from $3.8 billion in 2022, while the Missile Defense Agency requested $225.5 million for hypersonic defense, according to a February Congressional Research Service paper.
But according to Michael D. Griffin, former Secretary of Defense for Research and Technology, the United States won’t have a defense capability against hypersonic missiles until the mid-2020s at the earliest.
While Russia calls the Kinzhal a hypersonic missile because it is maneuverable and travels faster than the speed of sound, many Western military analysts, including Kaushal, call it a quasi-ballistic missile or maneuvering air-launched ballistic missile.
Putin said last month that Russia would continue serial production of Kinzhals and begin bulk deliveries of sea-launched Tsirkon hypersonic missiles this year.
Russia unveiled its Kinzhal missile in 2018 after advances in United States air defenses that Moscow feared would render Russia’s nuclear arsenal obsolete.
“The United States is allowing constant, uncontrolled growth in the number of antiballistic missiles, improving their quality and creating new missile launch sites,” Putin said in 2018. “If we do nothing, it will eventually lead to a complete devaluation of Russia’s nuclear potential, which means all of our missiles could easily be intercepted.”
Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
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