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Putin calls for resuming production of intermediate missiles after scrapping of treaty with US

FILE - A Russian military officer walks past the 9M729 land-based cruise missile on display in Kubinka outside Moscow, Russia, on Jan. 23, 2019. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for resuming production of intermediate-range missiles that were banned under a now-scrapped treaty with the US. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which banned ground-based missiles with a range of 500-5,500 kilometers (310-3,410 miles) was regarded as an arms control landmark when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a wreath laying ceremony at the Tomb of Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin Wall in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, June 22, 2024. Putin on Friday, June 28, 2024, called for resuming production of intermediate-range missiles that were banned under a now-scrapped treaty with the United States. (Sergei Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday called for resuming production of intermediate-range missiles that were banned under a now-scrapped treaty with the United States.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, or INF, which banned ground-based nuclear and conventional missiles with a range of 500-5,500 kilometers (310-3,410 miles), was regarded as an arms control landmark when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1988.

The U.S. withdrew from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian violations.

“We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said at a meeting of Russia’s national security council.

Putin said Russia hadn’t produced such missiles since the 2019 treaty scrapping, but that “today it is known that the United States not only produces these missile systems, but has already brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. Quite recently it was announced that they are in the Philippines.”

Since withdrawing from the treaty, the U.S. Army has moved forward with developing a conventional, ground-launched, midrange missile capability called the Typhon that would have been banned under the INF. The Typhon fires two Navy missiles, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile and Standard Missile-6.

The U.S. Army ran the system through tests during an exercise in the Philippines this spring.

The end of the INF was a milestone in the deterioration of relations between the U.S. and Russia.

The last remaining arms-control pact between Washington and Moscow is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It’s set to expire in 2026, and the lack of dialogue on anchoring a successor deal has worried arms control advocates.

Putin’s statement comes amid rising tensions between Russia and the West over the conflict in Ukraine and concern about possible nuclear attacks.

In June, Putin spoke to executives from international news organizations about Moscow’s use of nuclear weapons.

“We have a nuclear doctrine, look what it says,” he said. “If someone’s actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible for us to use all means at our disposal. This should not be taken lightly, superficially.”

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

What to know about the long-range cruise missile Russia says it fired

Russian naval forces launched long-range cruise missiles on Tuesday evening from the waters off Sevastopol, a port city in Russia-held Crimea, according to expert analysis of video verified by The Washington Post.

Russia said the 3M-14 Kalibr cruise missile attack destroyed a major Ukrainian arsenal.

Understanding the weapons that have drawn the world’s attention since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

A v ideo filmed by a witness from the Sevastopol waterfront on Tuesday shows at least four projectiles being fired from the water. Geolocation of the video by The Post shows the missiles appear to be traveling northwest, away from the city. As the narrator recites the date and location, the camera pans to show his surroundings.

“We thought it was a plane flying,” the narrator says. “It’s normal that planes fly here. But shooting is something serious.”

Additional video filmed around the same time shows eight flares with long tails that appear to be airborne missiles flying over the Black Sea. Both videos were verified by The Post.

Footage shared by the Russian defense ministry on social media shows large fireballs emanating from a warship where the ministry said Russian forces had fired Kalibr cruise missiles toward military assets in Orzhev, a village outside of the city of Rivne. Rivne is located more than 200 miles west of Kyiv and would be within the range a 3M-14 Kalibr missile could travel if it was fired from Sevastopol.

The tightly cropped video first shows multiple large explosions in succession above a ship, while someone off camera counts, “First, second, third, fourth.” The video then cuts to a wider view of a sunset where the long tails of the eight missiles are visible. The Post was not able to verify the location of this launch.

What you need to know about hypersonic missiles, which Biden says Russia used against Ukraine

Video reportedly of a Russian Project 21631 Buyan-M small missile ship launching 8 Kalibr-NK cruise missiles from near Sevastopol. https://t.co/GcWqUpoXLh pic.twitter.com/VvU3l5yYCK — Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 22, 2022

“As a result of the strike, a large depot of weapons and military equipment of the Ukrainian troops, including those received from Western countries, was destroyed,” a statement on the ministry’s Telegram channel said.

U.S. officials said they could not confirm that the weapons had been used. Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the deployment of the missiles or the destruction of an arsenal near Rivne.

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The Post could not independently verify Russia’s claim that a weapons depot had been destroyed.

Ian Williams, deputy director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he was nearly positive the videos showed the launch of 3M-14 Kalibr cruise missiles.

“These are Russia’s long-range naval sea-based cruise missiles, similar to the U.S. Tomahawk,” he told The Post in an email. “They use satellite navigation along with some onboard inertial guidance.”

“This was almost certainly launched by the Russian Black Sea Fleet,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser for the international security program at CSIS, said in an email. Kalibr missiles are “at the high end of Russian capabilities,” he added. “Russia uses them to attack the highest priority targets. They seem to be doing more of that in western Ukraine. It may be part of an effort to attack strategic targets, that is, targets that matter in the long war.”

The 3M-14 or SS-N-30A cruise missile , commonly referred to as the Kalibr missile, can be fired from ships or submarines toward land targets. It can travel a maximum range of about 1,550 miles, according to the CSIS Missile Defense Project.

3M14 Kalibr

Stabilizers

20 feet, 4 inches

6 foot person for scale

Pop-out wings

Control fins

The missiles, designed to penetrate the air defenses of stationary ground targets, fly autonomously and largely horizontally at low altitude, along preprogrammed waypoints. Their route can be updated midcourse via satellite communication. Cruise missiles can be highly accurate compared to ballistic missiles.

Low altitude

flight path,

by satellite

Approximate 1,550 mile range

Not to scale

3M14T Kalibr

flight path, parallel to

Low altitude flight path, parallel to ground

Tracks terrain

during flight

Route can be updated through satellites

The standard 3M14T land-attack missile reportedly contains a nearly 1,000-pound high explosive warhead. It is often used to attack storage facilities, command posts, seaports and airports.

Russia stuck barracks in the southern port city of Mykolaiv with a Kalibr missile earlier this month, the New York Times reported , killing at least eight Ukrainian soldiers who had been sleeping there. The region’s governor said at least 19 others were wounded.

A Pentagon official said at a background briefing Wednesday that the United States still assessed that Russia has “the vast majority” of its inventory of surface-to-air missiles and cruise missiles.

Russia first used the SS-N-30A Kalibr missile in Syria in October 2015, when it launched 26 missiles from Russian naval vessels in the Caspian Sea, at forces fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.

• Missiles of the World

Missiles of Russia

As the heir to the substantial Soviet missile arsenal, Russia boasts the widest inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles in the world. Russia remains a major power in the development of missiles of all kinds, and Russian strategic rocket forces constitute a significant element of Moscow’s military strategy. Russian missiles perform a wide variety of missions, from anti-access/area denial in local conflicts to delivery of strategic nuclear weapons across continents. A significant modernization program continues in Russia, producing new variants of both ballistic and cruise missiles with significant new capabilities. Russia is also making major advancements in the field of precision-guided cruise missiles.

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How Russia Uses Low Tech in Its High-Tech Weapons

Investigators who examined the electronics in Russia’s newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters were surprised to find decades-old technology reused from earlier models.

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By John Ismay

WASHINGTON — As Russian forces fire precision-guided weapons at military and civilian targets in Ukraine, officers in Ukraine’s security service working with private analysts have collected parts of the crashed missiles to unravel their enemy’s secrets.

The weapons are top of the line in the Russian arsenal. But they contained fairly low-tech components, analysts who examined them said, including a unique but basic satellite navigation system that was also found in other captured munitions.

Those findings are detailed in a new report issued Saturday by Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world. The research team examined the Russian matériel in July at the invitation of the Ukrainian government.

The report undercuts Moscow’s narrative of having a domestically rebuilt military that again rivals that of its Western adversaries.

But it also shows that the weapons Russia is using to destroy Ukrainian towns and cities are often powered by Western innovation , despite sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Crimea in 2014. Those restrictions were intended to stop the shipment of high-tech items that could help Russia’s military abilities.

“We saw that Russia reuses the same electronic components across multiple weapons, including their newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters, and we didn’t expect to see that,” said Damien Spleeters, an investigator for the group who contributed to the report. “Russian guided weapons are full of non-Russian technology and components, and most of the computer chips we documented were made by Western countries after 2014.”

How Russia obtained these parts is unclear. Mr. Spleeters is asking the manufacturers of the semiconductors how their goods ended up in Russian weapons, whether through legitimate transactions or straw-man purchases set up to skirt the sanctions.

The investigators analyzed the remains of three types of Russian cruise missiles — including Moscow’s newest and most advanced model, the Kh-101 — and its newest guided rocket, the Tornado-S. All of them contained identical components marked SN-99 that on close inspection, the team said, proved to be satellite navigation receivers that are critical for the missiles’ operation.

Mr. Spleeters said that Russia’s use of the same components pointed to bottlenecks in its supply chain and that restricting the supply of SN-99 components would slow Moscow’s ability to replenish its diminishing stockpile of guided weapons.

“If you want to have effective control and make sure that the Russians can’t get their hands on them, you need to know what the Russians need and what they use,” Mr. Spleeters said. “Then it’s important to know how they got it — what networks? What suppliers did they use?”

The investigators found an overall reliance by Russian engineers on certain semiconductors from specific Western manufacturers, not just in munitions but also in surveillance drones, communications equipment, helicopter avionics and other military goods.

“Over time, the Russians kept going back to the same manufacturers,” Mr. Spleeters said. “Once you know that, it gets easier to target those networks.”

“Looking at the computer chips in the same positions across multiple circuit boards, they were always made by the same manufacturers,” he said. “You’d have different dates of production, but always the same manufacturer.”

The report also revealed sharp differences between Russia’s top-shelf weapons and those that Ukrainian forces have received from the United States.

Warring parties often examine captured military hardware for intelligence value. But the investigators said they were shocked by Russia’s apparent indifference to having so many weapons that an adversary could potentially reverse-engineer.

“This is late 1990s or a mid-2000s level of technology at best,” Arsenio Menendez , a NASA contractor who reverse-engineers guided weapon components as a hobby, said after examining photos of Russian military electronics taken by the researchers. “It’s basically the equivalent of an Xbox 360 video game console, and it looks like it’s open to anyone who wants to take it apart and build their own copy of it.”

By comparison, the U.S. Defense Department has standards that military contractors must follow to make it harder for adversarial nation-states to build their own versions of captured weapons.

To protect this operational knowledge, which the Pentagon refers to with the anodyne term “critical program information,” military directives require the use of anti-tampering technologies meant to secure the lines of computer code and instructions that tell a weapon how to find its target.

Publicly released Pentagon directives provide only an outline of the program’s scope and requirements, and further details are classified. Military officials declined to discuss any anti-tampering technologies that the Defense Department may require.

“You can build a mesh around a computer chip that if probed will delete the contents,” Mr. Menendez said, adding that such protections were used in commercial goods like credit card readers to reduce theft and fraud.

The Russian navigation system resembles the open-source architecture of GPS receivers, which is not subject to federal restrictions regarding the sale and export of defense articles, he said.

“A team of college electrical engineering majors could build this,” he said.

The hodgepodge of parts that Russia uses to build its guided weapons may also help explain why its cruise missiles are sometimes not very accurate , Mr. Menendez said.

Errors made by nonstandard GPS units in processing satellite signals can ultimately cause a cruise missile to miss its target by a wide margin.

The Russian approach to weapons electronics appears to be “if you can’t keep up, steal the tech and do your best with it,” Mr. Menendez said.

John Ismay is a Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau and a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer. More about John Ismay

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Parts made by U.S. companies used to build Russian cruise missiles

Simon Ostrovsky Simon Ostrovsky

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Correction: A typo in the transcript misidentified Iryna Nikitska in one instance. We regret the error.

Ukraine suffered another barrage of Russian missile strikes on Friday, part of a deadly summer of attacks. But as NewsHour special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky discovered, many of the Russian-made cruise missiles wouldn’t be able to find their targets without the help of American companies. His investigation was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Geoff Bennett:

Again today, Ukraine suffered a barrage of Russian missile strikes, part of a deadly summer of attacks.

But as "NewsHour" special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has discovered, many of the Russian-made cruise missiles wouldn't be able to find their targets without the help of American companies.

His investigation is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Simon Ostrovsky:

In a village about 25 miles north of the Western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi, Ukrainian military officers show us the remains of a recent Russian missile strike against their country.

It's a scene that's become all too familiar in over 500 days of Russia's full-scale war. This guided Kh-101 missile didn't hurt anyone. It was shot down by one of the Western air defense systems donated to Ukraine in recent months.

These officers' job is to collect the fragments and bring them back to the capital for analysis. They have granted NewsHour unprecedented access to film their work, so we can find out for ourselves where the components that help these missiles find their targets come from.

So this looks like it might be part of the flight control unit. This will be really interesting to get a closer look at once it's brought back to the laboratory and cleaned up a little bit, because it's motherboards like these that we often find Western-made microchips in.

This is Iryna Nikitska. She runs a hospital lab on the other side of Ukraine in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown of Kryvyi Rih. Last month, she lost the thing most dear to her in a Russian missile strike.

Iryna Nikitska, Mother (through interpreter):

I had an only daughter. She lived. I raised her. I educated her. They took away my meaning of life.

On June 12, a barrage of missiles, including Kh-101s, rained down on the city, hitting this apartment building, where Iryna's daughter, Ksenia Edelman, and her daughter's husband, David Epelman, slept.

Iryna Nikitska (through interpreter):

When the neighbors were escaping, everyone knocked on the door of their apartment. But the door was jammed. And they could hear Ksenia screaming: "David, David." And then they heard nothing. And that was it.

A total of 13 people were killed in the attack.

As a mother, I blame myself. A mother's mission is to keep her safe. Why didn't I feel in my heart that there was danger?

You can't blame yourself.

Russia's ability to fire long-range missiles that Ukraine has brought the terror of war to cities far from fighting, regularly triggering air raid sirens that shake the calm of otherwise peaceful cities. One of the most commonly used is the airplane-launched Kh-101, designed originally by Russian aerospace firm MKB Raduga to carry tactical nukes, but now fitted with a conventional warhead and an upgraded guidance system.

When Russia fires the Kh-101s at densely populated cities like Kryvyi Rih, it may be committing a war crime. But does blame for such attacks end there? Ukrainian officials increasingly believe the companies whose components are being found in numerous Russian missiles need to be held to account too.

Man (through interpreter):

This is the factory identifier. The 315 is characteristic of Kh-101s.

We're at a secret location in Kyiv where technicians analyzed weapons recovered from the battlefield. The fragments from the Kh-101 that crashed in Khmelnytskyi have been brought here.

They have cut the flight control unit out of this section. And we're going to take a look at what they found inside. If you look at the outer casing of the flight control unit from this Kh-101 missile, then you see Russian writing, Russian parts all over it. It looks like a Russian computer.

But once you open it up and start looking at the motherboards that are hidden inside, put it underneath the electronic microscope, then you start to see what the brains of this machine are actually made of. And it's full of American components.

If we look here, we see imported components and not a single domestically made one. This is Altera. This is analog devices, Texas Instruments.

In this instrument alone, we found products made by five American companies, the most recently manufactured of which is this Xilinx Spartan-6 microchip made by Santa Clara, California-based AMD in 2020.

The company told NewsHour it had no record of the sale of the chip and suspected the markings on it may have been altered. Microchips manufactured after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine started have also turned up in Kh-101s, like these Zilog processors made in March of 2022 and recovered from a missile shut down in the city of Dnipro in March of 2023.

Yantar, Ukraine (through interpreter):

Russia lost the microelectronics war, and this is how it's trying to get by. It may be getting these microchips through contraband. It might be tapping stockpiles it already has.

But think about it. All of the mathematics of this missile are in one computer. And without one little microchip, they couldn't assemble it.

It's clear that they have been able to assemble it, even though sanctions have been in place against the Russian arms industry for almost a decade.

I asked Olexandra Vasylenko, the director general for economic diplomacy and sanctions policy at Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, what the U.S. and its allies were doing wrong.

Olexandra Vasylenko, Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (through interpreter): They are really cautious with their dialogue, and they are really cautious was enforcement.

And business should be explained, what will be the punishment if they will circumvent or not comply with the sanctions? And, definitely, we see that there is a lack of this conversation.

James Byrne, a director at the Royal United Services Institute in London and one of the authors of a report on the Russian defense industry's reliance on imported semiconductors, echoed the Ukrainian view that there was a little obvious enforcement of Russia sanctions.

James Byrne, Royal United Services Institute:

I don't believe there has been any such action. We did have huge fines on some of the large financial institutions. And they were ultimately for essentially practices, failures in due diligence.

So it's certainly a possibility that something like this could happen, particularly if it's — if it continues or if it emerges that some companies really didn't follow any sort of due diligence.

According to Russian state procurement records obtained by "NewsHour," the Kh-101's onboard computer is made by Russian computer maker Korund-M at a cost of around $9,000 each.

Moscow's Central Research Institute of Automation and Hydraulics purchased 20 of the units in 2019.

The Central Research Institute of Automation and Hydraulics is a leading company in Russia in the field of air and ground-launched cruise missile manufacturing.

We sent pictures of the microchips we found to their American manufacturers to ask them who they were sold to in order to try to expose Korund-M's supply chain. But none of the companies were willing or able to provide the information.

At Texas Instruments, we're much more than one of the world's leading semiconductor providers.

This isn't entirely surprising. American technology giant Texas Instruments, whose components are turning up in multiple weapons platforms used by Russia, including the missile we saw, voted down a proposal to report internally on misuse of their company's product at its annual shareholders meeting in April.

Rich Templeton, Chairman, Texas Instruments:

The board of directors recommends to vote against this proposal.

That's Texas Instruments chairman Rich Templeton. His board of directors recommended to vote against the proposal because of a belief that the company already had a sufficiently robust compliance system in place and — quote — "Complete traceability and prevention of product misuse is unachievable."

And not only do they not know where their parts are going. It sounds like they don't want to know.

James Byrne:

Building compliance teams, tracing supply chains can increase the costs and the burden on some of these manufacturers. But I think that really is something that a lot of manufacturers and companies should look very closely at, because these components are still ending up in Russian weapons platforms.

Texas Instruments told NewsHour it complies with the law and doesn't support or condone the use of its products and — quote — "applications for which they weren't designed."

In the meantime, Iryna consoles herself with the thought that accountability will eventually come to the people who made the missile that killed her daughter.

The people who do this, they must understand that innocent people are killed by the missiles they make.

No, I'm not filled with hate. I just believe that people who bring evil will get what they deserve.

Not everyone in Ukraine is as patient as Iryna. Demands for companies to take more responsibility and the U.S. authorities to go after those that don't are only going to grow louder as the civilian death toll grows bigger.

For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Simon Ostrovsky in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.

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Putin calls for making intermediate missiles that had been banned under Trump-scrapped treaty

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for resuming production of intermediate-range missiles that had been banned under a nuclear arms treaty with the United States that the Trump administration scrapped.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, or INF, which banned ground-based nuclear and conventional missiles with a range of 310 to 3,410 miles, was regarded as an arms control landmark when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan signed it in 1988.

The U.S. withdrew from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian violations.

“We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said Friday at a meeting of Russia’s national security council.

Putin said Russia hadn’t produced such missiles since the treaty scrapping, but that “today it is known that the United States not only produces these missile systems, but has already brought them to Europe for exercises, to Denmark. Quite recently it was announced that they are in the Philippines.”

World & Nation

News analysis: Why Putin is raising the specter of nuclear weapons again

Russia announces plans to hold drills near Ukraine simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons.

May 6, 2024

Since withdrawing from the treaty, the U.S. Army has moved forward with developing a conventional, ground-launched, midrange missile capability called the Typhon that would have been banned under the INF. The Typhon fires two Navy missiles, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile and Standard Missile-6.

The U.S. Army ran the system through tests during an exercise in the Philippines this spring.

The end of the INF was a milestone in the deterioration of relations between the U.S. and Russia.

A Ukrainian ‘King Lear’ comes to Shakespeare’s hometown. Its actors know true tragedy

Ukrainians displaced by war find new purpose in Shakespeare’s play of love, loss and madness, bringing their blood-red version to the bard’s hometown.

June 19, 2024

The last remaining arms-control pact between Washington and Moscow is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. It’s set to expire in 2026, and the lack of dialogue on anchoring a successor deal has worried arms control advocates.

Putin’s statement comes amid rising tensions between Moscow and the West over Russia’s war on Ukraine and concern about possible nuclear attacks.

In June, Putin spoke to executives from international news organizations about Moscow’s use of nuclear weapons.

“We have a nuclear doctrine, look what it says,” he said. “If someone’s actions threaten our sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible for us to use all means at our disposal. This should not be taken lightly, superficially.”

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Ukraine may fire U.S.-provided missiles deeper into Russia in self-defense, Pentagon says

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Putin issues his truce demands. Ukraine calls them ‘absurd’

June 14, 2024

Putin says he sees no threat warranting use of nuclear arms but again warns Russia could arm Western foes

June 7, 2024

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A Ukrainian soldier shot down a cruise missile using just a machine gun, officials say

• The Air Force of Ukraine claims that one of its soldiers downed a Russian missile using just a machine gun.
• The feat took place during a massive Russian aerial bombardment on June 12, it said.
• Experts have previously told BI that takedowns like this are extremely difficult.

A Ukrainian soldier successfully downed a Russian cruise missile using just a machine gun, according to claims from the Ukrainian armed forces.

The feat took place over the Kyiv region during a massive Russian aerial bombardment overnight on June 12, Ukraine's Air Force Command said on Thursday .

Business Insider could not independently verify the claim.

Related stories

When the bombardment alert came in, "they told us over the radio that our target was close," the soldier, identified as Serhii, said, according to Ukrainska Pravda's translation .

"Seconds later, we saw an enemy missile heading towards Vasylkiv," he continued, referring to a small city roughly 10 miles south of Kyiv.

Serhii said he didn't hesitate to open fire, adding: "After I fired from the machine gun, I saw the missile starting to veer off course and descend."

Serhii, formerly a civilian doctor who uses the callsign "Dr. Mom," said he only believed he'd shot the missile down after he saw the debris on the ground.

Experts examining similar past claims — such as a January report of a Russian cruise missile being shot down by a Soviet-era antiaircraft gun — told BI's Sinéad Baker that such feats are extremely difficult.

Serhii acknowledged that the claimed shoot-down was a very difficult thing to achieve, but said his sense of responsibility had made the "impossible possible," per The New Voice of Ukraine's translation .

An official Ukrainian account of that night's bombardment said that Russia had launched a volley of six missiles — including at least four cruise missiles — and 24 Shahed drones, with all but one of the missiles shot down.

Air defense units were deployed in multiple Ukrainian regions, including Kyiv, officials said.

Ukraine's recently replenished stockpiles of US-supplied antiaircraft missiles were instrumental in repelling the attack, The New York Times reported at the time .

Watch: Russia fires 120 missiles across Ukrainian cities

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