Kyiv faces 'meteorite' threat from Moscow

Vladimir Putin threatened yesterday to strike Kyiv with Oreshnik missiles, intermediate-range weapons that Moscow used against the city of Dnipro last week and that the Russian president has claimed cannot be shot down by any air defence system.

- Shaun Walker, Pjotr Sauer

"We do not rule out the use of Oreshnik against the military, military-industrial facilities or decision-making centres, including in Kyiv," Putin told a press conference in Kazakhstan. He said the weapon was "comparable in strength to a nuclear strike" if used several times on one location, though he added that it was not currently fitted with nuclear warheads.

"The kinetic impact is powerful, like a meteorite falling. We know in history what meteorites have fallen where, and what the consequences were. Sometimes it was enough for whole lakes to form," Putin said.

Moscow has said the new threats are a response to a decision this month by the US, Britain and France to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles provided by them against military targets inside Russia, something Kyiv had long requested.

Kyiv is better protected than most other Ukrainian cities by air defence batteries, and there have been few successful strikes on the centre of the capital during almost three years of war. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, described Putin's claim that air defence systems could not take out Oreshnik missiles as "fiction, of course".

"Putin doesn't understand military stuff. He's a guy that people come and show him some cartoon about how the missile will fly, how nobody will be able to shoot it down. He said the same thing many times about their Kinzhal missile. And then when it turned out that Patriot [air defence systems], even the not-the-latestgeneration systems, can comfortably shoot it down, he stopped talking about it," Podolyak said.

Podolyak also said there was "no such thing" as Oreshnik and that the missile was simply a lightly modified version of existing Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles. "The man has just come up with a name, just an abstract name," he said.