What happened
On 21 November 2024 Russia struck the Pivdenmash (Yuzhmash) plant area in Dnipro with a new intermediate-range ballistic missile carrying multiple conventional warheads. President Putin confirmed the launch that evening, named the system Oreshnik and described it as a test under combat conditions and a response to Ukraine's first use of Western long-range missiles inside Russia days earlier. United States officials described it as an experimental intermediate-range system; Ukrainian Defence Intelligence described a payload of six warheads with six submunitions each. No second combat use has been confirmed by either government. On 30 December 2025 Russia's Defence Ministry declared a Strategic Missile Forces unit armed with the system on combat duty in Belarus.
A signalling weapon rather than a battlefield one: the single use did little to the target and much to the negotiating and escalation debate, and it is the system behind the Belarus basing declaration a year later. It belongs on the timeline because Vigil's air-defence question has no answer to it — nothing Ukraine holds has demonstrated an intercept of a ballistic target of this class.
Confidence: High
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