KYIV — Russia launched an Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile, which is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, as part of a large-scale aerial assault on Ukraine overnight Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry said — a menacing reminder to the world of Moscow’s huge nuclear arsenal at a moment when a peace plan promoted by President Donald Trump appears to be faltering.
The latest Russian aerial barrage largely pummeled Kyiv, leaving close to half a million people without electricity in Kyiv and the surrounding region, officials said, as temperatures plummeted — prompting Mayor Vitali Klitschko to urge residents to temporarily evacuate the capital if possible.
Klitschko said nearly 6,000 apartment buildings — half of the city’s total — were without heat. Water supply was disrupted in some districts, he said, and he urged residents, “who have the opportunity to temporarily leave the city” to find “alternative sources of power and heat.”
Russian forces first used the Oreshnik — meaning “hazelnut tree” — in an attack on Ukraine in November 2024, creating concern in Western capitals over Moscow’s potential use of nuclear-capable weapons in the conflict. The missile fired overnight Friday did not carry a nuclear payload.
Countries friendly to Moscow, such as China, have warned Russia against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, meaning Russian President Vladimir Putin would risk wide international condemnation even by using a small-scale “tactical” nuclear weapon. Depending on the target, a nuclear strike could also pose the danger of releasing radiation next door to Putin’s own country.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Oreshnik was launched in retaliation for a claimed attack by Ukrainian drones on one of Putin’s residences — an attack that Trump, citing U.S. intelligence, now says never happened.
Trump initially expressed fury over the alleged drone strike after Putin told him that his residence in the northwestern Novgorod region had been targeted by drones. Kyiv, however, forcefully denied the attack, and local residents did not post anything about it on social media, despite Russia’s claims that 91 drones had been involved and shot down. Days later, Trump rejected Moscow’s claims.
In its statement, on the Telegram messaging platform, the Russian Defense Ministry called the alleged drone incident a “terrorist attack.”
Trump told reporters earlier this week: “I don’t believe that strike happened.”
Trump has been pushing an initiative to halt Russia’s war but with little indication that Putin is willing to support any ceasefire. After a meeting in Paris this week, European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said they had made progress on plans to provide postwar security guarantees and that their initiative was ready for Trump’s approval. Russia, however, quickly rejected any presence of Western peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, a core pillar of the security guarantees.
On Friday, Ukrainian officials did not specify whether an Oreshnik had been used, but Zelensky later said in a social media post that an Oreshnik had been part of Russia’s overnight aerial assault.
Ukraine’s security services, the SBU, said that its investigators had found debris indicating the missile was an Oreshnik — including the “stabilization and guidance unit,” which was described as the “brain” of the missile, and “parts from the engine unit.”
The country’s western air command said in a Facebook post that “the enemy launched a missile strike on infrastructure facilities in Lviv using a ballistic missile.”
“The air target was moving at a speed of about 13,000 kilometers per hour along a ballistic trajectory,” the air command said. “The type of missile with which the Russian aggressors attacked the city will be established after studying all its elements.”
Ukrainian media reported six loud explosions in the Lviv region, one after another, shortly before midnight.
In a Telegram post, Ukraine’s air force said that a “medium-rаnge ballistic missile” was launched from Russia’s Kapustin Yar test site, in the Astrakhan region on the Caspian Sea.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the possible use of an Oreshnik near Ukraine’s border with European Union and NATO member Poland was “a grave threat to the security on the European continent and a test for the transatlantic community.”
“We demand strong responses to Russia’s reckless actions,” Sybiha wrote on X.
“It is absurd that Russia attempts to justify this strike with the fake ‘Putin residence attack’ that never happened,” he wrote, adding that Putin used the Oreshnik “in response to his own hallucinations — this is truly a global threat.”
In addition to the Oreshnik, Ukraine’s air force said that the Russian attack involved 242 drones “of various types” and 36 missiles, including 13 ballistic missiles. In total, the air force said that 18 missiles and 16 drones pummeled 19 locations.
“The main direction of the attack was Kyiv region,” the air force said. Air raid alerts in the capital lasted until the early morning hours on Friday, with explosions ringing out regularly — as Ukrainian antiaircraft defenses countered the aerial assault and some of the drones and missiles hit their targets.
At least four people died and 22 were injured in Kyiv, Ukraine’s state emergency service said.
Among those killed was a first responder, Serhiy Smolyak. “When the emergency medical team arrived at the scene of the shelling of a residential building, the enemy launched a second strike,” Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Liashko wrote on social media.
The damage to Kyiv’s critical infrastructure was extensive, city officials said. Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said that at least 50 buildings, four educational institutions and 18 cars were damaged, as well as “more than 1,000 broken windows.” A Russian drone also damaged the Qatari Embassy in Kyiv, Zelensky said.
The difficult energy situation was made worse as temperatures across Ukraine were forecasted to remain well below freezing.
“This is one of the most difficult attacks on the city,” Tkachenko said. This was in part due to “the challenging weather,” he said, which the Russians were “counting on,” hoping that “we will freeze and our services will collapse.”
Klitschko warned Kyiv residents that the cold weather would not let up for some time.
“City services are operating in emergency mode,” the mayor wrote on Telegram. “And the weather conditions, unfortunately, are forecast to be difficult in the coming days.”
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