The Russian defense ministry said on Friday that it had struck Ukraine with a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile, an ominous warning by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as U.S.-led negotiations to end the war have gained steam.
Russia said it had used the missile, known as the Oreshnik, and other weapons to hit drone-making and energy infrastructure in Ukraine. Explosions were reported early Friday near the western city of Lviv after the Ukrainian military warned of a potential missile launch. The Oreshnik can carry conventional or dummy warheads in addition to nuclear ones.
The Russian defense ministry called the strike a response to an attempted Ukrainian attack last month on one of Mr. Putin’s residences in Russia. Ukrainian officials have called the Kremlin’s claims of an attack on the residence a lie intended to derail the peace talks, and U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that there is no evidence that such an attack occurred.
In a statement early Friday, the Ukrainian Air Force reported the threat of a launch from a Russian strategic nuclear testing site, the Kapustin Yar facility near the Caspian Sea.
The strike, in western Ukraine near its borders with E.U. and NATO nations, was only the second time in the war that an Oreshnik missile has been fired, from a site for Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, far from Ukraine’s borders. The previous strike took place in 2024 in central Ukraine.
The Lviv strike came at a moment of tension as Ukraine has rebuffed Russian demands to surrender territory in peace talks and the Trump administration ousted a Russian ally, President Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela. The United States this week also seized a Russian-flagged tanker in the North Atlantic that Washington said was trying to ship crude from Venezuela in violation of sanctions.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, called the strike “a grave threat to the security of the European Continent and a test for the trans-Atlantic community.” Mr. Sybiha said in a statement that Ukraine had informed the United States, European nations and international organizations about the attack.
“It is absurd that Russia attempts to justify this strike with the fake ‘Putin residence attack’ that never happened,” Mr. Sybiha wrote. Mr. Putin, he said, had fired the missile near an “E.U. and NATO border in response to his own hallucinations — This is truly a global threat.”
The statement called on countries to step up pressure on Russia’s oil industry, including cracking down on tankers that evade sanctions.
After the earlier strike in 2024, Mr. Putin touted the Oreshnik as a new development of Russia’s arms industry and a reason for the West to back away from its assistance to Ukraine in defending itself against Russia’s invasion, which began in 2022 but has largely bogged down in slow-moving fighting with Russia gaining little ground.
It is not an entirely new design. The Pentagon said the missile was based on an intercontinental missile, the RS-26 Rubezh, which was redesigned with a shorter range. Firing it was seen as a hardly veiled nuclear threat: The missile is an integral part of Russia’s strategic nuclear force.
The missile carries multiple warheads that separate in flight and plummet down on a target. Ukraine has no air defense systems capable of shooting it down.
After Russia fired an intermediate-range missile at Ukraine in November of 2024, Mr. Putin identified the missile and laid out his reasons for its use. He had fired the missile, he said, in retaliation for the United States and Britain granting permission to Ukraine to strike with Western-made weapons deep into Russian territory.
Early Friday, the Ukrainian Air Force said the threat of a launch came from Russia at about 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, before the explosions were heard in the Lviv region. The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, wrote in a post on Telegram that explosions damaged infrastructure that he did not specify.
In the 2024 firing, Russia struck an aerospace factory in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro. But it caused only minimal damage as it carried dummy warheads, suggesting a purely symbolic use of the weapon.
This time, the explosions that followed the warning came far closer to the border with Poland. Poland is a member of NATO and the European Union, suggesting a possible intention to signal a more imminent threat.
Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014.
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