The message came screaming through the skies at 8,000 miles per hour.
Early Friday morning, for just the second time since its all-out invasion of Ukraine, Russia fired a nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile — a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic weapon that until recently was banned under international treaty.
The missile landed on a military site in western Ukraine and reportedly inflicted little damage, leaving a couple of unimpressive craters in the frozen earth. But its true target was farther afield, analysts and political officials said: Ukraine’s allies in Europe.
The site that was struck is about 40 miles from the border with Poland, a NATO country. Britain and France, fellow members of the alliance, said this week that they were prepared to deploy troops to Ukraine to guarantee postwar peace. If they were to follow through, their forces most likely would be stationed in the area that Russia hit on Friday.
Moscow has said repeatedly, including in remarks by the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Thursday, that any NATO forces on Ukrainian soil would be a legitimate military target for Russia. By firing the Oreshnik, which has a range covering almost all of Europe, Moscow showed how it could carry out its threat both inside Ukraine and well beyond.
That the missile is capable of carrying nuclear warheads only added to the menace, as strong European support of Ukraine has led President Vladimir V. Putin to declare that Europe has all but declared war against Russia.
“The Oreshnik is not a weapon of war against Ukraine; it is a weapon of war against Europe,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst, noting that Moscow regularly uses plenty of other weapons to attack Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the strike was a response to an attempted attack on one of Mr. Putin’s residences last month. Ukrainian officials said that Russia had fabricated the attack, drawing from a playbook in which it finds justification for continuing its strikes on Ukraine whenever U.S.-led peace talks head in directions the Kremlin does not like.
Whatever the case, Mr. Markov and other pro-Kremlin analysts said Friday’s strike was not primarily about any attack on a presidential dacha.
It was, they said, directly related to the security commitments that European governments agreed to in Paris earlier this week. In addition to the “military hubs” that Britain and France said they would establish on Ukrainian territory once fighting stops, Germany said it would send troops to NATO countries bordering Ukraine.
Such vows are sensitive for the Kremlin because of Russia’s historical grievances against the West, its security concerns over NATO expansion, and its belief in spheres of influence giving it sway over Eastern Europe.
“That is why the strike was delivered right next to the border,” Mr. Markov said.
Cheering the missile strike, Dmitri Medvedev, a former president turned Kremlin attack dog, said it should bring Russia’s adversaries to their senses, likening it to an injection of an antipsychotic medication.
Some Russian analysts said that in firing the Oreshnik, the Kremlin was also sending a message to the Trump administration.
Mr. Putin has argued that Russia is winning the war and has said that his military is prepared to fight until it has achieved all of its objectives. The Kremlin, these analysts said, wants the Trump administration to know that the war will end only if the United States and Ukraine’s European allies push Kyiv to concede.
Mr. Putin has hailed the Oreshnik as a symbol of Russian military might and technological innovation. He has called the missile, which slammed into Ukraine at speeds exceeding Mach 10, an unstoppable tool in Moscow’s arsenal. Ukraine has no air defenses that can bring it down.
European and Ukrainian officials called the use of the missile an escalation of Moscow’s war, just as the United States is pushing for an end to the conflict. They also called it a warning to all of Europe, where many leaders say that if Ukraine falls to Russia, other countries could follow.
The strike functions as a “reminder to the whole continent that there is an option of strategic strike against any target with little warning, short flight time and likely no reliable interception capability,” said Dmitry Stefanovich, a Moscow-based researcher with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.
Further raising the threat, Mr. Stefanovich said, is the fact that Moscow can launch intermediate-range ballistic missiles from multiple places, including from neighboring Belarus.
That country, a vassal state of Moscow, has hosted Russian tactical nuclear weapons since December 2023. Last month, the Kremlin released a video of what it said was the deployment of the Oreshnik system in Belarus, a major point of concern for its NATO neighbors — Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
The missile launched on Friday was believed to have come from another site, Kapustin Yar, near Astrakhan in southwestern Russia.
The Oreshnik can carry conventional or dummy warheads in addition to nuclear ones. A Ukrainian assessment that the warheads in the missile fired on Friday held no explosives was one sign that it had been launched largely to send a message.
The sub-munitions that the warhead released were “kinetic” — meaning that they contained solid pieces of metal, not explosives — and caused little damage, said Col. Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. Traveling at supersonic speed, the metal still carried enough energy to smash through buildings, vehicles or people.
The first time Moscow launched an Oreshnik into Ukraine, in November 2024, it was in response to Ukraine’s firing of longer-range missiles provided by the United States and Britain at military targets inside Russia.
In that strike, too, Russia had equipped the missile with dummy warheads. Without the nuclear warheads, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear arms at Middlebury College, the Oreshnik appears technically underwhelming.
Using such an expensive system — Russia most likely can produce only a small number each year — to inflict limited damage confirmed that the military effect of the launch was secondary to the “political benefit” of trying to intimidate Europe, Mr. Lewis said.
Mr. Putin “is trying to manipulate a sense of nuclear risk to restrain or discourage the West from aiding Ukraine,” he said. “But each time they fire an Oreshnik, it loses a little bit of its shock value.”
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and John Ismay from Washington.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
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