Russia fires missiles at Ukraine after Kyiv's first use of long-range American missiles inside Russia
Russia launched a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation for Ukraine's attack earlier in the week on a military facility in the Russian region of Bryansk. That strike saw the Ukrainians use American-made and supplied long-range missiles known as ATACMS, which President Biden had given the Ukrainian forces permission to fire deeper into Russian territory only two days earlier.
Moscow had warned the U.S. and its NATO allies for months against granting Ukraine permission to fire Western missiles into Russia, and Mr. Biden's weekend decision to permit such strikes drew stark new warnings from lawmakers and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. was escalating the nearly three-year conflict at the risk of sparking a new world war.
The U.S. and its allies have argued that it's Putin escalating the war he started by ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers to bolster his own forces in recent weeks. But there was little doubt that Moscow would respond to the Ukrainians' first use of the American ATACMS to strike inside Russia somehow, and air raid sirens blared across the country Wednesday as the U.S. closed its embassy in Kyiv and warned of a possible imminent "significant air attack."
The attack didn't come on Wednesday, but rather overnight, with Russian missiles targeting several cities but hitting central-eastern Dnipro the hardest. The Ukrainian Air Force claimed that Russia's assault on the city included its first use during the war of an intercontinental ballistic missile, though a Western official told CBS News on Thursday that an ICBM was not used in the strike.
Two U.S. officials also told CBS News that Russia had fired a ballistic missile, not an ICBM on Thursday, with one saying it appeared to have been an intermediate range ballistic missile launched from just east of Volgograd, Russia, to target Dnipro. If accurate, that would be a flight path of about 500 miles.
Despite the denials from U.S. officials, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on social media that "all the characteristics" of a Russian missile used in the strike on Dnipro "corresponds to an intercontinental ballistic missile," though he said an investigation was underway to confirm exactly what had been fired at the city.
Zelenskyy accused "our crazy neighbor" Russia of using his country "as a testing ground" for its new weapons.
A U.S. official told CBS News later Thursday that Russia was believed to have launched an experimental intermediate range ballistic missile based on the country's RS-26 Rubezh missile.
The U.S. was notified prior to the launch through nuclear risk reduction channels, the official said, adding that the U.S. had briefed Ukraine and close allies and partners in recent days about the possibility that Russia could use such a weapon in order to help them prepare.
Russia is likely to only possess a handful of the experimental weapons, the official said, noting that Ukraine has withstood countless Russian attacks with missiles that had significantly larger warheads that this experimental IRBM.
The official also added that President Biden earlier this year said the U.S. was providing Ukraine with hundreds of additional Patriot and AMRAAM missiles to strengthen its air defenses, many of which have already been delivered.
During a live televised news conference in Moscow on Thursday, Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova received a phone call and a man identified only as "Masha" could be heard ordering her not to make any comment on the "ballistic missile strike that the Westerners have started talking about" in Dnipro.
The Ukrainian air force did not say what the purported Russian ICBM had targeted or whether it had caused any damage, but the Dnipro regional governor, Serhiy Lysak, said the strike damaged an industrial enterprise and ignited fires in the city, wounding 15 people.
The Ukrainian Air Force said the Russian attack also included a Kinzhal hypersonic missile and seven cruise missiles — all weapons used many times previously by Russia during the war. Six of the Russian missiles were shot down, the air force said.
The strike came hours after the CBS News team in Kyiv, along with hundreds of thousands of residents of the Ukrainian capital, were forced to scramble for cover in underground parking lots, metro stations and basements on Wednesday as air raid alarms sounded.
In the end, no missiles landed on Wednesday, leaving Ukraine to accuse Russia of a psychological attack.
"We are very worried," one young Kyiv resident told CBS News. "We want to keep our country. We want to live in peace."
After more than two and a half years of war in Ukraine, the scars and the anxiety run deep.
"It could happen any minute, any hour," Major Taras Berezovets, of Ukraine's Territorial Defense force, told CBS News, arguing that Russia and Putin are blackmailing his country, trying to frighten Ukrainians into surrendering – "trying to make the conclusion that any sort of opposition to Russian invasion is absolutely useless."
Some believe both Russia and Ukraine are trying to maximize their gains — and with them, their leverage for any future cease-fire talks — before President-elect Donald Trump comes back into office in January.
There's significant fear in Ukraine and in European capitals that Trump could cut U.S. support for Kyiv, forcing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's government to accept a negotiated truce with Russia that sees Ukraine give up land occupied by Putin's forces.