Ukraine war live: Russia could launch lethal new ballistic missile in ‘coming days’

Vladimir Putin said Russia had struck Ukraine with a new hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile in response to Kyiv’s use of US and British missiles against Russia.

On 21 November, he said Russia had launched an “Oreshnik”, one of its newest intermediate-range missiles, at a defence enterprise in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Putin said it travelled at 10 times the speed of sound and could not be intercepted. It has a range of around 3,100 miles allowing Russia to strike most of Europe, according to experts.

It appears to have multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles: separate warheads able to hit different targets.

Anatoly Matviychuk, a Russian military expert, said it could carry six to eight conventional or nuclear warheads, and was probably already in service.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has criticised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for his call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine.

“No one should boost personal image at the expense of unity… There can be no discussions about the war that Russia wages against Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said on X.

The Kremlin said earlier on Wednesday that Putin had told Orban in a phone call that Kyiv’s policy continued to exclude the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the conflict. It did not say when the call took place.

Russia’s Defence Ministry said that Ukraine had attacked a military airfield in the southern Russian city of Taganrog with six US-supplied ATACMS missiles and promised retaliation.

The ministry said in a statement that all six missiles had been shot down or intercepted, but that falling missile debris had caused injuries among some personnel.

“There was no damage, two buildings on the technical territory of the airfield and three military vehicles, as well as civilian cars in the parking lot adjacent to the airfield were slightly damaged (by shrapnel),” the ministry said.

“This attack by Western long-range weapons will not go unanswered and appropriate measures will be taken,” it said.

President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia would develop artificial intelligence with BRICS partners and other countries, a bid to challenge the dominance of the United States in one of the most disruptive technologies of the 21st Century.

“I am confident that the international alliance of national associations and development institutes in the field of AI of BRICS countries and other interested states will give a significant boost to such cooperation,” Putin told an AI conference in Moscow.

“We will launch this alliance today,” he said.

Russia’s largest lender Sberbank said that the new AI Alliance Network would include national AI associations from China, ranked as one of the world’s top two AI powers, along with Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa, in a partnership.

Russian troops destroyed or captured several Ukrainian positions near the eastern city of Pokrovsk, Kyiv’s military has said, as Moscow bears down on the strategic logistics hub that is home to a unique Ukrainian coking mine.

After months of accelerating advances towards Pokrovsk, Moscow’s forces are now as close as 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) from the southern outskirts of the city, according to Ukraine‘s DeepState, which maps the front lines using open sources.

“As a result of prolonged clashes, two of our positions were destroyed, one was lost. Currently, measures are being taken to restore positions,” Nazar Voloshyn, Ukraine‘s military spokesman for the eastern front, said in televised comments.

Pokrovsk, situated about 18 kilometres (11 miles) from the boundary of Ukraine‘s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, has for months been the area of the fiercest battles in Russia’s 33-month-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In October and November, the Russian military advanced towards the city at its fastest rate since the early months of the war, analysts said. Ukraine, which has been on the back foot since its failed 2023 counteroffensive, says Russia has been sustaining some of its heaviest losses of the war to date.

Russia could launch another experimental hypersonic ballistic missile in Ukraine in coming days, but Washington does not consider the Oreshnik weapon a game changer in the war, a US official has said.

“We assess that the Oreshnik is not a game-changer on the battlefield, but rather just another attempt by Russia to terrorize Ukraine, which will fail,” the official told Reuters. Russia previously used the new weapon on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, according to two senior Ukrainian government sources.

Ukraine‘s course of European integration is irreversible, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said, adding Russian President Vladimir Putin had not achieved a single war goal.

Speaking at a German-Ukrainian economic forum, Scholz also said a lot of private investment was needed in Ukraine‘s energy sector.

European Union ambassadors have agreed to a 15th package of sanctions on Russia over its war against Ukraine, the Hungarian EU presidency said.

The presidency said in a post on X that the sanctions would limit the activity of vessels of third states operating in ways that supported Russia’s actions against Ukraine and added more people and entities to the sanctions list.

The sanctions package is likely to be formally adopted at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday.