‘Dagger’ highlights vulnerability
Russia this week fired half a dozen of its rare Kinzhal hypersonic missiles at Ukraine, as part of a broader barrage that killed six people, and which the Russian Defence Ministry described as revenge for an incursion into western Russia last week by a far-right Russian nationalist group fighting on Ukraine’s side in the war.
But rather than impressing some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hardline critics, the use of the Kinzhals only raised questions about the potential waste of some of Russia’s most advanced and expensive weaponry.
Russia’s use of the Kinzhal (dagger in Russian) has renewed alarm over the Kremlin’s sophisticated arsenal. It has also highlighted that Putin possesses difficult-to-intercept, nuclearcapable weapons that the United States and its allies do not yet have.
Hypersonic missiles are highly manoeuvrable weapons that travel at speeds more than five times the speed of sound, making them extremely hard to intercept. The US and China are also developing them. Russia used hypersonic weapons in Ukraine for the first time in March last year.
Moscow has been testing two other hypersonic weapons – the Avangard, a hypersonic glide vehicle launched from an intercontinental ballistic missile, which has reportedly been deployed since 2019; and the Tsirkon, launched from the ground or warships and submarines, which went into production in 2021.
Sidharth Kaushal, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the Kinzhal was expensive, and Russia’s stocks were probably limited, although there are no reliable estimates on the number Moscow has or how fast it can produce them.
‘‘Why they used the Kinzhal is an interesting question, because I can’t see an obvious logic to doing so,’’ Kaushal said. This week’s attack fit into Moscow’s campaign of targeting energy facilities and infrastructure, he said, but this could easily have been
accomplished with other, less expensive weapons.
Some analysts and commentators have speculated that the use of the hypersonic weapons was designed to convince Putin’s domestic audience of his determination to hit hard and defeat Ukraine, as he readies the nation for a drawn-out war with high casualties.
If that was Putin’s goal, however, he appeared to fall short. A pro-Kremlin Russian propaganda outlet on Telegram, Readovka Explains, complained that the ‘‘most powerful strike in
recent times’’ was not as devastating as some of Russia’s November strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities, and caused limited power outages but no total blackout.
Yuriy Ihnat, spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force Command, said Russia so far had used around 20 Kinzhal missiles, and probably had about 50 of them. He said that intercepting the missiles with the defensive systems Ukraine had was ‘‘unrealistic’’.
According to Michael D Griffin, former US undersecretary of defence for research and engineering, the US will not have a defensive capability against hypersonic missiles until the mid-2020s at the earliest.
Ukraine’s capital Kyiv had most of its power supply restored yesterday, officials said. Serhii Popko, the head of the city’s military administration, said about 30% of consumers remained without heating, and that repair work was continuing.
Power supplies were fully restored in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, private provider DTEK said, though significant damage remained in the Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions in Ukraine’s northwest and northeast.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said the fighting in the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut had ‘‘escalated’’, with another push by Russian forces to break through Ukrainian defence lines that have largely held firm for six months.
■ Russia has added the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to its register of foreign agents.
Russian law requires individuals and organisations that are determined to have received foreign funding and to have engaged in loosely defined ‘‘political activity’’ to identify themselves as ‘‘foreign agents’’.
The Russian Justice Ministry said the WWF, ‘‘under the guise of protecting nature and the environment . . . tried to influence the decisions of the executive and legislative authorities’’ and ‘‘hindered the implementation of industrial and infrastructure projects’’. WWF representatives promised to contest the decision in court.