Click to see full-size image. (Lviv State Aviation Repair Plant)
The target of the January 9 Oreshnik missile strike was the Lviv State Aviation Repair Plant in western Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense revealed.
In a statement released on January 12, the ministry said, citing several independent sources, that the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) disabled the aviation repair plant.
At the time of the strike, fighter jets of the Ukrainian Air Force, including American-made F-16s and Soviet-made MiG-29s supplied by the Western countries, were being maintained at the plant, the ministry added, noting that the plant also produced long-range and medium-range attack drones used to hit civilian facilities in “the depth of Russian territory.”
“The Oreshnik system engaged production workshops, warehouses with products (UAVs), as well as the infrastructure of the factory airfield,” the statement reads.
The ministry also revealed that on the same day a “massive attack with the use of the Iskander missile system and the Kalibr sea-based cruise missiles” hit the production facilities of two enterprises in Kiev “involved in assembling strike drones,” as well as “energy infrastructure facilities that “support the work of the Ukrainian defence industry.”
Initially, it was speculated that the target of the Oreshnik strike was an underground gas facility in the city of Striy, about 60 kilometers south of Lviv capital.
Lviv Mayor Andrey Sadovoy acknowledged a day after the strike that “a piece of critical infrastructure” had been struck in the region.
The strike marked the second combat use of the IRBM by the Russian military. The existence of the Oreshnik first became known on November 21 of 2024 when Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a televised address, announced that the missile struck a military facility, later identified as the Pivdenmash aerospace plan, near the city of Dnipro in the southeastern Ukrainian region of Dnipropetrovsk.
The Oreshnik is capable of reaching speeds exceeding Mach 10. The missile’s payload consists of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles – previously exclusively used by nuclear weapons – equipped with six warheads, each reportedly containing submunitions.
Its reentry vehicles have the ability to maneuver at a speed over Mach 5 at low altitudes in the atmosphere, which means that the missile is a real hypersonic weapon.
The range of the missile is reported to be between 5,000 and 5,500 kilometers, which is on the higher end of the IRBM category.
Despite its complexity, the Oreshnik was designed to be launched from ground-based mobile launchers, which makes it even a bigger threat.
In August of last year, Putin announced that the Oreshnik had entered production and service. Later in December, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed that the system will be deployed in his country. The deployment is clearly meant to deter not just Ukraine, but also NATO.
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uncle sam has no counter to this. 😤
recent months saw a large u.s. military build up in the caribbean, with socom deploying assists in puerto rico and near trinidad and tobago…………………………… https://psee.io/8jqu9r