President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia’s new intermediate-range ballistic missile, codenamed Oreshnik, will be ready for combat deployment by the end of this year.
The missile, whose name means hazel tree in Russian, was publicly revealed in November 2024 after it was used in a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Putin described the attack at the time as a successful test and portrayed the missile’s first use in combat as a warning to the United States and Britain as they considered providing Ukraine with long-range weapons capable of striking deep inside Russia.
Last month, Putin said Russia had begun moving toward mass production of the Oreshnik, having previously touted its destructive power as comparable to that of a nuclear weapon and claiming it could not be intercepted. Some experts have expressed skepticism toward those claims.
“By the end of this year, the new medium-range missile system with a hypersonic missile Oreshnik will be put on combat duty,” Putin said at a large gathering of top military brass in Moscow on Wednesday.
Russia has said it also plans to deploy the missile to neighboring Belarus, which borders Ukraine and NATO member states. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said last month that Oreshnik would enter combat duty there by the end of 2025.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that the missile’s range poses a threat to Europe and has urged Western governments to impose sanctions on the Russian companies involved in its development.
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