Russia’s apparent first-ever launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile – against the Ukrainian city Dnipro on Wednesday – is widely being seen as Kremlin retaliation for Ukrainian strikes using advanced western missiles inside Russian Federation territory.
Context means a lot. Here are five things worth keeping in mind against a background of the first wartime use of an intercontinental ballistic missile, by Russia against Ukraine, in history.
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- Ukraine has bombarded the Russian Federation with its own ballistic missiles a few times, and its own strike drones hundreds of times.
The first time Ukraine launched a ballistic missile that hit Russian Federation territory was on the second day of Russia’s full-scale Ukraine invasion, on Feb. 25, 2022, when a Tochka-U missile hit the Millerovo military airfield in Russia’s Rostov region. At the time, the Russian Air Force was surging bomber strikes and fighter out of the base to hit targets across Ukraine.
Since then, Ukraine, probably because of problems manufacturing more Tochka-U missiles, has gradually shifted to kamikaze drone swarms for long-range strikes inside Russia, and artillery and rocket artillery for short-range strikes. Some Ukrainian drones have hit targets more than 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) inside Russia, close to the Arctic Circle.
Probably the biggest Ukrainian drone attack inside Russia (so far) took place on Aug. 14, when a reported 150 drones of various types hit four airfields in central and western Russia.
Did Russia Launch an ICBM at Ukraine for the First Time? Here’s What We Know
- Ukraine has fired American ATACMS missiles against targets in lands claimed by Russia as sovereign territory for more than a year. Just not inside “Old Russia.”
Kyiv has used the ATACMS missile, which it used on Monday, against Russian military targets in occupied Crimea and occupied south Ukraine for some time.
The Kremlin claims both places are part of Russia because Russia “annexed” them. The UN and practically all other countries have declared the annexations illegal.
Washington appears to have transferred ATACMS missiles to Ukraine in at least two batches, about 10-15 missiles in September 2023 and 30-40 missiles in April-May 2024.
Like an ICBM, the ATACMS flies in a ballistic arc and is difficult to intercept, but its range is much less than an ICBM, like the one the Russians launched on Wednesday.
On Monday, Ukraine, for the first time fired ATACMS missiles into Russia’s Belgorod region, which is widely accepted as legitimate Russian territory. It’s not clear whether the weapons were part of a fresh US delivery, or from reserves.
- That ATACMS strike and how the missiles seemed to ignore Russian defenses was more than a little embarrassing for the Kremlin
Monday’s ATACMS strike hit a major Russian army ammunition depot near the village of Karachev, in Russia’s western Bryansk region. This well-known facility is reportedly the largest single munitions storage site in western Russia.
A successful Ukrainian drone strike hitting the base on Oct. 9 set fires burning for days and touched off bunker explosions powerful enough to register as minor earthquakes.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, on Monday, claimed five of the six incoming missiles were shot down, but geo-located video recorded during the attack seemed to show at least four powerful ground explosions.
Based on that evidence, it’s probable that the strikes demonstrated dedicated Russian air defenses protecting a key military site targeted in the past by Ukraine with Ukrainian weapons, are ineffective against American ATACMS missiles. That that failure took place inside Russia was, for a Kremlin looking to maintain an image of strength, power, and military omnipotence before both Russian citizens and its adversaries, made the optics of the ATACMS strike even worse.
- Ukraine’s Tuesday strike with British cruise missiles, called Storm Shadow, against Russia’s Kursk region, was a big military embarrassment for the Kremlin as well.
According to milbloggers, local sources, regional social media, and even images recorded by a Ukrainian observation drone as the cruise missiles were boring in, as many as a dozen high-tech Storm Shadows hit near a Kursk region village called Maryno on Tuesday.
Taken together, that content and later comment by milbloggers seemed to confirm the fact of a seemingly textbook surgical strike by modern weapons, against an opponent with either ineffective air defenses or no air defenses at all: multiple missile strikes recorded from multiple angles, and no sign of return fire of any kind.
Russian and Ukrainian military information platforms widely reported the target was the headquarters of Russia’s Joint Forces North, a major command node reporting directly to the Kremlin, and responsible for operations in Russia’s Kursk, Belgorod, and Bryansk regions, and in Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Sumy regions.
Some detonations seemed to show Storm Shadows, a low-flying weapon designed for both anti-ship and bunker-busting attacks, exploding underground. According to unconfirmed reports, the Ukrainian strike intended to kill or wound the top commander of all Russian forces in that sector, General Aleksander Lapin, and a delegation of North Korean senior officers who had arrived to coordinate the commitment to combat of North Korean troops sent to Moscow by Pyongyang in October.
Those reports are not fully confirmed, but a Ukrainian missile strike able to time weapons on target to the presence of a specific group of foreign dignitaries at a clandestine Russian military headquarters would be evidence of a gross Russian security failure.
- The Ukrainian Air Force just ran its most ambitious air operation since the early days of the war and it succeeded – which doesn’t make the Russian Air Force look particularly good.
The pro-Kremlin milbloggers, FighterBomber, a former combat pilot closely associated with the Russian Air Force, on Tuesday, reported the missiles were in the air 150-180 seconds, between release and target impact.
That data if accurate implies at least six Ukrainian strike aircraft, almost certainly with escorts, made missile drops 90-100 kilometers (56-62 miles) from the headquarters, almost certainly likely from air space above Ukraine’s Sumy region.
Based on the number of Storm Shadow missiles that hit the headquarters, the Monday strike contained at least six bombers, plus escort aircraft, and by scale, probably was the single biggest air operation attempted by the Ukrainian Air Force, since early 2022.
Aside from islands of air space protected by a small number of heavy Western air defense systems, Russia’s Air Force has owned Ukraine’s skies since March 2022.
Since airborne Russian air defense radars monitor hundreds of kilometers into Ukrainian air space, the Ukrainian pilots’ apparent success in evading Russian air defense radars and interceptors in the Tuesday air raid, was a serious embarrassment for the Russian Air Force, which has near-total air superiority over Ukraine.
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