A Reuters report, quoting two senior Ukrainian government sources, claims that the Russian Oreshnik missile attack in Dnepropetrovsk caused “limited damage.”
One of the sources said the missile was carrying dummy warheads and described the damage caused as “quite small.”
The second source said: “In this case, (the missile) was without explosives…There were no types of explosions like we expected. There was something, but it was not huge.”
Quoting unnamed “experts,” the report suggests that Russian forces left out explosives from the warheads enclosed in the heat-protected reentry vehicle (RV) to create space for instruments used to evaluate the missile’s performance during testing.
The report concludes that the missile attack was merely a warning to the West and quotes the director of the US government-funded Institute of International Studies in California derisively saying, “I would say this is an incredibly expensive way to deliver what is probably not that much destruction.”
Let’s look at the Reuters report in detail to ascertain its veracity.
RV Instrumentation
We will start with the claim that the Russian priority was to test the missile, not deliver a sobering blow to Ukraine in response to the latter’s escalatory use of long-range Western weapons to strike Russian territory. As a result, the Russians were forced to remove the warheads and instead place instrumentation and telemetry in the RV to measure the missile’s performance.
As mentioned in an earlier Eurasian Times analysis, the Russian hypersonic MIRV (Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle) capability is built around the Avangard hypersonic glide RV. The Avangard is designed to deliver nuclear or conventional payloads at speeds up to Mach 20 while performing evasive maneuvers to evade missile defenses. Its flexibility and speed make it a key element of Russia’s hypersonic strategy.
The Avangard has already been tested, perfected, and operationally deployed on at least two Russian ICBMs. Russia plans to make its entire strategic missile deterrent hypersonic based on the Avangard. There would be no reason whatsoever to have instrumentation in the Avangard!
The Reuters report, which relies totally on Ukrainian inputs, does not provide any evidence of its instrumentation in the RV claim—no instrumentation was recovered from the point of impact, which is strange. The Avangard RV would have impacted Ukrainian territory after releasing the warheads, so it should have been easy for the Ukrainians to recover parts of the instrumentation fitted on it.
On an aside, Reuters’ trust in Ukrainian sources, typical of Western mainstream media, is truly amazing. Readers might recall that Ukrainian intelligence claims that it was not the Oreshnik missile that struck the Yuzhmash plant in Dnepropetrovsk but the Kedr, an ICBM speculated to be under development in Russia!
Extent Of Damage
The Reuters report does not dwell upon or show the extent of the damage caused by the non-explosive warheads; it simply states that the multiple warheads caused “limited damage.”
Agreed, the warheads had no explosives. However, you have to be embarrassingly clueless in physics even to think that the impact of a metallic object traveling at Mach 10 would result in “little damage.”
Ask a fighter pilot who has experienced a small-sized bird strike flying at 800 kph, as did the author flying a Jaguar in the IAF. He will tell you how much damage can result from mere flesh and small bones striking metal at that speed. And if the bird strikes engine compressor blades, the pilot’s only way back to Mother Earth is suspended under a parachute canopy.
In the case of the Oreshnik, metal, possibly tungsten, flying at nearly 11,000 kph, struck the targets!
There were 36 impact points. It’s surprising that Reuters Ukrainian sources could not show a photograph of even one impact point.
The report fails to mention that many of the missile development facilities at the Yuzmash plant struck by the Oreshnik missile are reportedly located underground.
Several decades ago, an IAF MiG-21, flying at Mach 1, impacted farmland in Punjab in a vertical dive. It left no large crater at the point of impact; the aircraft simply disappeared. I believe the IAF could not recover any wreckage because it had penetrated deep underground. Had an underground facility existed at the point of impact, it would have been completely destroyed.
Thirty-six sets of tungsten rods impacting at Mach 10 would not leave the target’s underground facility intact.
Conclusion
There can be little doubt that the Reuters report is disinformation.
To be effective, the falsehood in disinformation has to be laced around incontrovertible facts. I am quoting from the CIA playbook.
What the second source quoted by Reuters said is more or less the incontrovertible truth.
“In this case, (the missile) was without explosives…There were no types of explosions like we expected. There was something, but it was not huge.”
The above statements are correct, considering what we have discussed in the preceding paragraphs. A metallic object traveling at Mach 10 is unlikely to create a telltale crater. Video recording of the Oreshnik strike showed no explosions, and no satellite images of warhead impacts have been published.
The disinformation laced around the above incontrovertible truth is that the missile was merely a test that caused “little damage.”
If the Russian intent was to merely test the missile they could have done so at one of their several test ranges. The communication link between the hypothetical instrumentation in the RV and launch monitoring sites would have been far more reliable.
Why would the Russians reveal the characteristics of the missile and some of the technology that went into it by doing a test over Ukrainian territory?
If the intent was merely to send a message to the West, why didn’t the Russians symbolically target the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament), which would have been largely unoccupied at the time of the attack?
Open-source evidence suggests that Russian forces successfully attacked a military-industrial facility in the city of Dnipro. Specifically, the attack was aimed at the PA Pivdenmash facility, known by Russians as Yuzhmash, which manufactures missiles and other armaments.
- Vijainder K Thakur is a retired IAF Jaguar pilot, author, software architect, entrepreneur, and military analyst.
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