War in Ukraine: Russia Uses Hypersonic Missiles in Broad Strike on Ukraine (Published 2023) (2024)

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Here is what happened in Russia’s latest aerial attack.

The strikes included six of the new hypersonic missiles known as Kinzhals, or Daggers. That is the most Russia has used in a single wave since the war began a year ago, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. Overall, Russia fired nine types of cruise and ballistic missiles alongside a volley of eight Iranian-made exploding drones.

Of the 81 missiles fired overnight and through the morning, 47 hit targets, Ukraine said. That is a far higher ratio of strikes to missiles fired than Russia has achieved in barrages over recent months. Moscow’s higher success rate was made possible because Russian forces used some of their limited supply of hypersonic Kinzhal missiles and a higher than typical number of ballistic rather than cruise missiles, Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force, said in an interview.

Here are the latest developments:

• Five people were killed in their homes when a rocket landed in a residential area in the western region of Lviv, bordering Poland, and one person died in the Dnipropetrovsk region of central Ukraine, local officials said. To the north, in the Kharkiv region near the border with Russia, 15 missiles hit infrastructure and a residential building, the head of the region’s military administration said on Telegram. Four people were also killed in Russian shelling in the southern city of Kherson, officials said.

• In the capital, Kyiv, two large explosions an hour apart injured at least two residents and sent a plume of black smoke billowing from the city’s center, rattling windows and engulfing cars in flames. At least one hypersonic missile appeared to have struck the capital, an official in Kyiv said.

• The head of the United Nations’ nuclear agency issued an impassioned plea after the strikes temporarily cut off the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine from external power lines and forced it to switch to diesel generators. It was the sixth time the plant has had to move to its emergency power supply since the war began, the official, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said. “If we allow this to continue time after time, then one day our luck will run out,” he said, referring to the possibility of a nuclear accident.

• Georgia’s governing party, facing mounting pressure from protesters, said on Thursday that it had decided to withdraw proposed legislation on “foreign agents.” Critics said the bill mimicked a Russian law used by the Kremlin to thwart opposition news media outlets and civil society.

Here’s why experts are concerned about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant’s safety risks.

“Each time, we are rolling a dice,” Mr. Grossi said on Thursday, “and if we allow this to continue time after time, then one day our luck will run out.”

“I am astonished by the complacency,” added Mr. Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Later in the day, Ukraine’s national electric utility, Ukrenergo, said that the plant had been reconnected to the power grid after 11 hours.

The European Atomic Energy Community — whose membership is composed of E.U. nations but which lies outside the authority of the European Parliament — and 49 countries made a joint appeal to the I.A.E.A., saying that Russia should leave the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, according to the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal. “Nuclear terrorism and Russian blackmail must be stopped,” Mr. Shmyhal saidon Twitter as he saluted the appeal.

The dangers of being at the center of a war zone, including repeatedly moving to emergency power, pose a serious risk of nuclear catastrophe, experts say. Here’s a closer look at why.

‘Offline’ nuclear plants still need power.

Even through all of the reactors at the Zaporizhzhia plant have been shut down, the equipment that cools their nuclear cores and spent fuel rods needs a constant source of power. If the cooling is interrupted, the heat from the nuclear material could melt through its containment, spewing radiation.

The site is running out of diesel fuel.

It’s important that a nuclear plant remains connected to an external power source, either the power grid or a backup.

The Zaporizhzhia plant’s emergency generators are powered by diesel fuel, but there is only so much on site. When the generators were activated after the shelling on Thursday, there was enough fuel to keep the generators going for 15 days, according to a statement from the I.A.E.A. And the plant is near a very active front line.

“The concern is that it’s difficult to get diesel to that part of the battlefield to refill the generators to make sure the power stays on,” said Amy J. Nelson, the Rubenstein Fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and a nuclear security expert.

During the previous periods when the plant was disconnected from external power, engineers raced to make repairs before the diesel fuel ran out. International nuclear inspectors have called the situation unsustainable and precarious.

The war presents other meltdown risks.

Although the plant was designed to account for risks from natural disasters, plane crashes and the like, no nuclear facility has ever before been at the center of active fighting.

Experts have a multitude of concerns. “It’s fire,” Ms. Nelson said. “It’s explosions from pressure building up.”

She noted that fuel rods could become corroded and cause a nuclear accident.

Any of these issues could disrupt power. Nuclear reactions produce heat that is channeled into steam to produce electricity, and any disturbance to the cooling process could cause a meltdown. Ms. Nelson referred to the events in Japan, in 2011, when an earthquake set off a tsunami that damaged the f*ckushima nuclear complex, causing meltdowns.

“The temperature in the reactor increased so much that the corrosion was accelerated and caused a leakage of fuel,” she said.

If a power transformer is hit by shelling, that raises the risk of a fire. And cooling failures short of a meltdown could create pressure that might lead to an explosion.

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Satellite images show widespread destruction after heavy fighting in Bakhmut.

Some of the most severe damage is seen in neighborhoods on the eastern side of the city, which Russia this week said it controlled. It was not possible to independently verify that claim.

Another image from Monday shows a neighborhood and a bridge in the southern part of the city that were heavily damaged over the last couple of weeks.

Questions surround Russia’s use of hypersonic missiles in its latest attack.

First, what are hypersonic missiles?

Hypersonic missiles are long-range, highly maneuverable munitions capable of reaching speeds of at least Mach 5 — five times the speed of sound, or more than a mile a second. That speed renders traditional air defense systems essentially useless, because by the time they are detected by ground-based radars, they are already nearly at their target.

China and the United States are in a race to develop and deploy hypersonic missiles. Other countries are also working on the technology, including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea and South Korea.

How does the Kinzhal work?

The typical hypersonic vehicle carries its warhead to the lower boundary of space atop a traditional long-range missile. After separation, it uses gravity to gain tremendous speed on the descent back to earth. The vehicle may be an unpowered gliding craft, or it may be a cruise missile that uses gravitational acceleration to ignite a special “scramjet” engine that carries it hundreds of miles farther.

The Kinzhal is a little different. It is a modified version of the Russian Army’s Iskander short-range ballistic missile, which is designed to be fired from truck-mounted launchers on the ground. Launching the missile from a warplane at high altitude, instead of from the ground, leaves it with more fuel to use to reach higher speeds.

Aside from its ability to reach hypersonic speeds after its air launch, the Kinzhal is believed to behave like a ground-launched Iskander, meaning it is able to maneuver to make interception difficult. Some Iskanders also can release decoys before impact that are designed to further confuse air-defense radars.

Conventionally armed Iskanders are believed to carry about 1,500 pounds of explosives.

What else is known about the Kinzhal?

Russia originally developed the Kinzhal to breach American anti-missile defense systems and claims it reaches speeds of Mach 10 and greater. The Pentagon has said it is launched by MiG-31 warplanes.

Moscow first said it had deployed the Kinzhal in Ukraine nearly a year ago in an attack on an underground weapons dump, and has periodically claimed its use since.

There is another hypersonic missile Russia claims to have in its arsenal: the Zircon, a cruise missile that can be launched from ships. But Russia did not report test-firing the Zircon during exercises announced by President Vladimir V. Putin in January, and it is not known to have ever been used in combat.

Why are Kinzhals so worrisome for Ukraine?

Ukraine has no weapons capable of shooting down the Kinzhals, according to Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force.

And their use on Thursday significantly increased the proportion of Russia’s missiles reaching targets. Of the 81 missiles Russia fired overnight and through the morning, Ukraine said that 47 hit their targets, a higher ratio than usual. Ukraine noted that Russia had also fired more ballistic missiles and fewer cruise missiles than usual, a possible factor in the increase in successful strikes.

What are the limitations of the Kinzhal?

Targeting coordinates are loaded into the missile’s operating system before launch, and because of the tremendous speed it achieves in flight, any small deflection — for instance, a control surface on a wing moving slightly too much or too little — can result in a major deviation from the target. That may explain why one Kinzhal appears to have struck a car in Kyiv on Thursday, rather than a target with more military significance.

And like any hypersonic missile, the Kinzhal’s flight path reaches into the uppermost regions of Earth’s atmosphere before arcing back toward the earth for finer maneuvers. It can be detected by space-based sensors, though U.S. defense officials say those systems are insufficient against hypersonics.

Why would Russia use so much of its hypersonic arsenal in one wave?

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has estimated Russia had, before the volley fired Thursday, no more than 50 Kinzhals, Mr. Ihnat said. Why Russia decided to fire six of them — potentially more than a tenth of its total arsenal — is unclear.

“For one reason or another, they needed a result” this time, Mr. Ihnat said.

But Russia may be able to replenish the Kinzhals relatively easily. Since the Kinzhal is simply a modified version of an existing missile, it could be easier to produce than, say, creating more Zircons, which have to be built from scratch.

Will the use of Kinzhals change the war?

Not necessarily, even if Russia can produce more Kinzhals relatively rapidly. Even though more of Russia’s missiles than usual got through on Thursday, an air war alone will not be decisive.

By comparison, Russia causes far more destruction through the thousands of artillery shells it fires in Ukraine.

And the ground war essentially remains in a grinding stalemate. Many analysts say that Russia’s long-anticipated spring offensive is already underway, but that it is having little impact because its troops and arsenals are so depleted.

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On the Bakhmut front lines, nightly skirmishes are followed by Russian artillery barrages.

Earlier in the battle, he said, the assaults would correspond with vulnerable moments on the Ukrainian lines — when soldiers were rotating out for instance — suggesting good battlefield reconnaissance on the Russian side.

Now, he said, the assault units of three or four soldiers are pushing forward regardless. “They try to find our positions, we notice them, gunfire starts,” he said of the fighting.

Once Ukrainian troops reveal their positions by opening fire, he said, they are pounded by Russian artillery. The pattern typically repeats twice overnight, around 2 and 4 a.m., he said.

It was unclear, he said, whether the Wagner group is deploying fewer ex-convicts while relying on more experienced soldiers for risky assaults operations; a week ago, he said, he captured a former prisoner fighting with Wagner. In any case, he said, Ukraine’s military was inflicting heavy casualties on the assault groups.

“Now is the time when we can destroy a lot of them,” he said. Ukraine’s continued defense of the city despite the stepped-up assaults is likely demoralizing for Russian soldiers, he said. “They see we are like made of iron and not leaving,” he said.

Russia’s latest missile barrage highlights the growing complexity of the air war.

Of the 81 missiles fired overnight, 47 hit targets, Ukraine said. That is a far higher ratio of strikes to missiles fired than Russia has achieved in barrages over recent months.

The higher success rate for Russia was made possible because it used some of Moscow’s limited supply of hypersonic Kinzhals and a higher than typical number of ballistic rather than cruise missiles, Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Air Force, said in an interview.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency had estimated before the volley fired Thursday that Russia had no more than 50 Kinzhals, Mr. Ihnat said. The missiles are ground-based Iskander ballistic missiles that have been modified so that they can be fired from a warplane. They are hard to intercept when shot from a high altitude because they can reach speeds five times the speed of sound and still maneuver.

Why Russia decided to fire more than a tenth of its total arsenal of sophisticated missiles at Ukrainian electrical power plants is unclear. Russia originally developed the missiles to breach American antimissile defense systems.

Ukraine has no weapons capable of shooting down the Kinzhals, Mr. Ihnat said. He suggested Moscow resorted to their use to guarantee hits after Ukraine’s success in downing about 70 percent of the volleys of older cruise missiles, using a range of tactics including stationing soldiers with shoulder-fired missiles along likely flight paths.

“For one reason or another, they needed a result” this time, he said.

Separately, Russia shot a larger number of ballistic missiles in the attack on Thursday than it typically does, including 13 older S-300 air defense missiles that had been repurposed to fly on a ballistic arc and hit targets on the ground. These are difficult to shoot down but are inaccurate, often blowing holes in streets or fields hundreds of yards from a target.

“It was a massive strike, from multiple directions, firing from the air and sea and with kamikaze drones,” Mr. Ihnat said of Thursday’s barrage, the latest of a dozen or so large-scale missile attacks targeting Ukrainian cities and electrical infrastructure since Russia began its campaign of attacks on areas far from the front line last October.

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Latvia is sending cars seized from drunken drivers to Ukraine.

“They will be in better hands,” said Reinis Poznaks, who leads a charity that was tasked by the government to deliver the vehicles to Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Latvia’s state revenue service, which keeps records of state property, posted on Facebook a picture of cars loaded on a truck in the country’s snow-covered landscape, noting that they would “no longer be driven on Latvian roads by their former owners — drunk drivers.”

The first batch of cars will start making their way to Ukraine on Friday, Mr. Poznaks said. They will be transferred to Ukrainian Army units, a hospital in the city of Vinnytsia in west-central Ukraine and a medical association in Kupiansk, in the country’s east, the government said in a statement. Fifteen more are set to go next week, Mr. Poznaks said.

After Estonia, Latvia spends the largest share of its gross domestic product in aid to Ukraine, according to an analysis by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a Germany-based research institute. Latvia was part of the Soviet Union until it gained its independence in 1991, and among many displays of solidarity with Ukraine, the country has also torn down a Soviet-era monument in its capital, Riga.

“Once again, we have demonstrated our unity in our support for Ukraine,” said Arvils Aseradens, Latvia’s finance minister. “Every act of support, big or small, brings us closer to victory in this senseless war.”

Mr. Poznaks said that since Russia’s invasion last year, he and his nongovernmental organization, Agendum, had separately sent more than 1,000 cars that were either donated or bought through donations to Ukraine. For Latvians, he said, it has almost become a “new tradition” to give their old cars to Ukraine when they want to get a new one.

“We just do what we can,” Mr. Poznaks said. “Ukraine is also defending us. We are the next ones in Russia’s plan to restore the great empire.”

Worried that drunken driving violations were not decreasing, Latvia in November made driving with a blood-alcohol level over 0.15 percent a criminal offense and, with court approval, officials have started seizing the cars of drunken drivers. The cars being sent to Ukraine are mostly older with high mileage, but in running order, the government said. So far, about 200 cars have been seized.

Mr. Poznaks said that his group was selecting cars that were not in bad condition “because Ukraine needs transport, not problems.” But they don’t need to be too fancy.

“They don’t need Teslas or new Mercedes in Ukraine,” he said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry says Thursday’s attacks were retaliation for a raid in a border region last week.

On March 2, a Russian group fighting for Ukraine staged a brief armed incursion into a Russian border village, drawing an emergency response from the Kremlin and prompting President Vladimir V. Putin to convene his security council over the most brazen known raid inside the country since the invasion.

What actually happened was immediately shrouded by conflicting claims from pro-Kremlin voices and their opponents, with the Russian authorities eventually claiming that the group killed two civilians and injured a child before escaping back into Ukraine.

Mr. Putin denounced the episode as a “terrorist” attack, a label Russia frequently applies to the periodic explosions on Russian territory believed to be Ukrainian strikes.

The Russian government response was widely criticized by pro-war Russian military bloggers, an increasingly influential group, who said the raid exposed the weakness of the country’s border defenses and humiliated its security forces.

The Russian Volunteer Corps, a group opposed to Mr. Putin and led by a far-right Russian nationalist in exile, claimed that it had briefly taken control of the village, Lyubichane, in the Russian region of Bryansk, near the border with northeastern Ukraine.

The group posted a video online of two armed men outside what appeared to be a medical building in Lyubichane. The group also posted another video that a New York Times analysis confirmed had been taken in Shushany, a Russian village about 10 miles to the south.

It is unclear whether the group operates with the assent of the Ukrainian government, as it claims. However, it has fought against Russian forces previously in the war. The group said on Telegram that it “came to Bryansk region to show the compatriots that there is hope, that free Russian people with weapons in their hands can fight the regime.”

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Ukraine is still fighting for the eastern city of Bakhmut, a top general says.

It was not possible to independently assess the claim of Russian control over neighborhoods to the east of the Bakhmutka River, which flows through the city’s center. Ukraine had earlier blown up pontoon crossings to prevent Russian advances over the river, which could be used as a defensive line in the fierce street-by-street combat that has gripped Bakhmut for weeks now, military analysts have said.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said Thursday that far from withdrawing, the Ukrainian military was reinforcing its defenses in the city. “The defense of Bakhmut becomes more relevant” each day, he said in comments published by the Ukrainian military press office.

The Wagner group, he said, was losing experienced soldiers in the street fighting. After months of deploying poorly trained former prisoners to assault Ukrainian defenses, Wagner has pivoted to sending forward more experienced soldiers, Ukrainian officials said earlier this week.

The commander said the threat that Wagner would advance to the west after capturing Bakhmut justified Ukraine’s defense of the city, though it is largely destroyed and depopulated. “I am proud of the courage and heroism of our soldiers,” he said.

Ukrainian military officials have been vague on the extent of their control of specific neighborhoods in Bakhmut. A deputy brigade commander, Maj. Rodion Kudriashov, told Ukrainian media on Thursday that Ukrainian forces are maneuvering within the city and rely on multiple layers of defensive lines. What he called main strongholds within the city, and supply routes into it, remain under Ukrainian military control, he said.

The spokesman for the eastern military command, Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, pushed back on Thursday on comments by Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, on Wednesday that Ukraine could lose Bakhmut in the coming days, but that the loss would not shift the course of the war.

“Such statements should be treated with respect but with the understanding they do not fully understand the situation,” Colonel Cherevaty said.

Ukrainian authorities announced on Wednesday a mandatory evacuation of children from Bakhmut, suggesting either a window of relatively safer travel on the access roads had opened, or an expectation of more intense street fighting in the days ahead.

Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said earlier this week that less than 4,000 civilians remained in Bakhmut, including at least 38 children. Many of those minors have been holed up in basem*nts with parents who had refused to leave.

At least one parent will be ordered to evacuate along with a child, Ms. Vereshchuk said in a television interview, so as not to separate children from their guardians.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv.

Far from the front line, a community in western Ukraine is devastated by a Russian strike.

Three men and two women were at home in the Zolochiv area of the Lviv region when a Russian missile struck the residential area at around 4 a.m. local time, Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the region’s military administration, said on the Telegram messaging app. The Zolochiv district is in the northeastern portion of the Lviv region, and around 80 miles from the Polish border.

Images and videos posted from the scene of the attack on social media showed emergency responders digging through the ruins of the damaged building before dawn. In later footage recorded in daylight, construction vehicles can be seen digging through the piles of debris. Another clip posted by the regional military administration on Thursday morning showed drone footage of the scene of the attack.

Air defense systems shot down the rest of the missiles that were spotted in the region’s airspace, according to Mr. Kozytskyi. But a number of residential buildings were destroyed by fire from the fallout of the attack, he said.

“The fire destroyed three residential buildings, three cars, a garage and several outbuildings,” but has since been put out, Mr. Kozytskyi added.

The pace of normal life has continued in the regional capital of Lviv for much of the war despite the risk of aerial attacks. While the funerals of soldiers from this region sent to fight on the front line in the east offer a regular reminder of the toll of the war, civilian casualties there have remained at a minimum compared with other parts of Ukraine.

Even the rolling blackouts that had plagued much of the country — starting in October when Russian forces began a prolonged offensive on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure — were easily mitigated, with generators maintaining power, allowing people to continue to work and enabling children to attend school.

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The U.N.’s atomic agency denounces complacency over safety at the Zaporizhzhia plant after more Russian shelling.

In a fiery statement to the agency’s board of governors on Thursday, Mr. Grossi urged immediate action to restore security at the plant, which Russian forces occupied shortly after invading the country a year ago.

“What are we doing?” he said, according to the agency. “How can we sit here in this room this morning and allow this to happen? This cannot go on.” He added, “I am astonished by the complacency.”

“Each time, we are rolling a dice,” Mr. Grossi said, “and if we allow this to continue time after time, then one day our luck will run out.”

The board, which decides policy for the organization, is made up of 35 member states including Russia, according to the agency’s website.

Russian shelling early Thursday cut the external power lines that supply electricity to the plant’s six reactors, according to Ukraine’s state nuclear company, Energoatom. The company said the plant had a supply of diesel to power the generators for 10 days, although the I.A.E.A., which has stationed inspectors at the plant, said there was enough fuel for 15 days.

Bringing additional diesel supplies across the front line in the southern Zaporizhzhia region is extremely difficult, and Energoatom warned of the danger of not having enough power for the facility, whose equipment to prevent a radiation leak requires a constant source of fuel, even with all of the reactors offline.

“If it is impossible to renew the external power supply of the station during this time, an accident with radiation consequences for the whole world may occur,” the company said on Telegram.

External power to the plant was last cut off in November, Mr. Grossi said. Each time the power source to the plant has been severed, engineers have raced to make repairs before the plant’s 18 diesel generators run out of fuel. International nuclear inspectors have repeatedly called the situation unsustainable and precarious.

The U.N. atomic agency has spent months trying to forge an agreement between Moscow and Kyiv to establish a safety and security zone around the plant. But Ukraine’s energy minister said this week that talks were at a dead end because Russia had refused his government’s demand to withdraw from the plant and hand control of it back to Energoatom. Moscow has placed the plant under the control of its own state nuclear company, Rosatom.

The predawn shelling on Thursday came as Russia launched missile and drone attacks across Ukraine as part of a monthslong campaign to damage the country’s power infrastructure.

Since Moscow’s troops began occupying the Zaporizhzhia facility, it has been hit by rocket fire, which at one point damaged an area where spent nuclear fuel is stored. There have also been multiple reports of shells landing in and near the plant’s grounds. Russian forces have also set up machine-gun posts at the plant, Energoatom said this week.

The Ukrainian authorities say that some of the Ukrainian workers who remain there have been interrogated and that at least one had been killed by Russian forces.