Russia’s first hypersonic missile strikes hit fuel and storage depots in Ukraine

Russia fired its new generation Kinzhal hypersonic missile at targets in Ukraine at the weekend in the first combat use of a weapon that President Putin boasts can outwit any air defence system.

In Moscow, the defence ministry said air-launched Kinzhal missiles were fired from Crimean airspace yesterday, hitting a fuel and lubricant storage facility of the Ukrainian armed forces near Kostiantynivka in the southern region of Mykolaiv.

Moscow said on Saturday that the Kinzhal system was used to destroy an underground Ukrainian storage facility for missiles and aircraft munitions in Deliatyn, western Ukraine. The defence ministry published drone video of what it said was the first of the two strikes: a long building in a snowy landscape bursting into flames as it was hit.

The Kinzhal (Dagger) is a hypersonic weapon, meaning it moves at several times the speed of sound and is practically impossible to knock out of the sky as it moves towards its target.

It is typically fitted to MiG-31 warplanes and was announced by Putin in a speech in 2018 in which he boasted that Russia had a growing arsenal of “menacing” superweapons invulnerable to western defences.

Putin said at the time that the Kinzhal was a precision-guided aircraft-based missile with “no analogues in the world”. He later added that it could travel at ten times the speed of sound and “manoeuvre at all phases of its flight trajectory”, delivering conventional or nuclear warheads at a range of up to 1,250 miles.

MiG-31 jets carrying the Kinzhal have since taken part in displays over Moscow during the annual May 9 Victory Day celebrations. Michael Kofman, the leading US expert on the Russian military, said the Kinzhal was “incredibly difficult to intercept”.

Yesterday’s strike destroyed the main fuel supply base for Ukrainian armoured vehicles in the south of the country, Moscow claimed. Kalibr cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea had also targeted the depot, Major General Igor Konashenkov said. Ukraine earlier confirmed the strike on the Deliatyn depot but it had not confirmed the weapon used.

Experts said that the Kinzhal appears to be a modified version of the Iskander ballistic missile, which is fired from mobile erector-launchers on the ground, and has already been used in the conflict. Ukraine claims that Russia has already used up a large number of its Iskander missiles.

The Kinzhal may have been deployed because of the relative success of Ukraine’s Soviet-era S-300 air defence systems against Russian aircraft and missiles.

Such systems and combat aircraft are “continuing to effectively defend Ukrainian airspace”, the Ministry of Defence in London said on Saturday.

 “Russia has failed to gain control of the air and is largely relying on stand-off weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace to strike targets within Ukraine,” the ministry said. “Gaining control of the air was one of Russia’s principal objectives for the opening days of the conflict and their continued failure to do so has significantly blunted their operational progress.”

The US is working to put a hypersonic weapon into operation, and China is also pursuing the technology. The US weapon, to be installed on a warship as soon as the end of next year, would be launched like a ballistic missile and release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would reach speeds seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound, according to the US Navy.

Another weapons system being shown off by the Russians yesterday was a battery of thermobaric rockets.

The rockets, which can melt human organs, were shown on RT, the television station, being fired from the top of a tank. It is believed that the video was taken near Mariupol, the besieged port city in southern Ukraine.

The Ministry of Defence said earlier this month that Russia had confirmed using “devastating” TOS-1A thermobaric weapons in Ukraine, which suck in oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion. Moscow did not publicly acknowledge use of the weapon, which the MoD said it feared could be used against civilians.

Separately, the US-made Patriot air defence system was on its way to Slovakia, the defence minister Jaroslav Nad said yesterday, possibly paving the way for that country to deliver similar hardware to Ukraine.