What is the purpose of using an Oreshnik hypersonic missile against civilians?

Sunday 24 March 2026

The overnight use of an Oreshnik hypersonic missile against Kyiv, together with a massed barrage of drones and conventional missiles directed against residential districts and civilian infrastructure, marks another stage in the transformation of Russia’s war in Ukraine from a campaign of territorial conquest into a campaign of strategic intimidation. The attack, which Ukrainian officials said damaged schools, apartment buildings, markets, water infrastructure and diplomatic premises, killed at least four civilians and injured dozens more. Russia confirmed the use of the Oreshnik system, one of the most politically symbolic weapons in her arsenal.

The military significance of the strike is questionable. Its political significance is not.

The Oreshnik missile occupies a peculiar place in Russia’s contemporary strategic doctrine. It is less important as a battlefield weapon than as an instrument of theatre. Derived from the RS-26 Rubezh intermediate-range ballistic missile system, capable of carrying nuclear or conventional payloads and travelling at hypersonic velocity, the missile is intended to project an aura of technological supremacy and escalation dominance. Yet the repeated use of such an expensive and limited system against cities rather than decisive military targets reveals a deeper anxiety within the Kremlin.

Weapons of terror emerge most frequently when armies fail to achieve their operational objectives.

By the spring of 2026 Russia’s battlefield advances in eastern Ukraine had largely stalled into a pattern of grinding attritional warfare. Russian forces continued to expend enormous quantities of manpower and materiel for marginal territorial gains measured in villages and tree lines rather than operational breakthroughs. Despite repeated offensives across Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, Moscow has been unable to produce the kind of strategic collapse she anticipated either in 2022 or in the subsequent years of mobilisation. The front has hardened into a militarised scar across eastern Ukraine, and although Russia still retains numerical superiority in artillery and manpower, she has not demonstrated the capacity to convert these advantages into decisive victory.

This creates a political problem for the Russian government.

The Kremlin built its wartime legitimacy upon the image of unstoppable momentum. Russian state propaganda has consistently portrayed the war as historically inevitable, technologically sophisticated and strategically successful. Yet wars cannot indefinitely be narrated into victory when the maps barely move and casualty lists continue to grow. Under such conditions governments frequently resort to spectacles of destruction against civilian centres to manufacture the appearance of power where operational success is absent.

The Oreshnik strike therefore appears less like a demonstration of confidence than a manifestation of frustration.

Historically, regimes that employ strategic terror against cities during periods of battlefield stagnation often do so because they have exhausted easier military options. Germany’s V-2 campaign against Britain during the Second World War offers an uncomfortable parallel. The V-2 rocket represented advanced technology, generated enormous fear and consumed vast resources, but it did not alter the strategic trajectory of the war. Instead it revealed a leadership increasingly disconnected from operational reality, seeking psychological impact as compensation for deteriorating military fortunes.

The comparison is imperfect but instructive.

Russia’s use of hypersonic weapons against civilian targets similarly communicates an inability to impose decisive military outcomes upon the battlefield itself. If Moscow possessed the capacity to collapse Ukrainian defensive lines conventionally, she would not need to rely upon highly symbolic strategic bombardment of apartment blocks and municipal utilities. Terror strikes become substitutes for manoeuvre warfare when manoeuvre warfare ceases to function.

Moreover the psychological intention behind the Oreshnik attack appears directed not only at Ukraine but also at Western audiences. Analysts have long noted that the Kremlin uses hypersonic systems partly as instruments of nuclear signalling and geopolitical intimidation.   The purpose is to remind European governments and the United States that Russia retains escalation capabilities that Ukraine lacks. In effect Moscow seeks to inject fear into Western political systems already fatigued by a long war, fluctuating energy prices, electoral instability and uncertainty about future commitments to Kyiv.

Yet this strategy carries risks for Russia herself.

The repeated targeting of civilians using increasingly dramatic weapons systems undermines Moscow’s remaining claims that she is conducting a restrained or legally justified military operation. Each strike strengthens the perception amongst European governments that contemporary Russia functions not as a conventional great power pursuing rational strategic aims but as a revisionist state willing to employ indiscriminate violence to compensate for military frustration.

This distinction matters because perceptions shape long-term policy.

European rearmament since 2022 has accelerated precisely because Russia’s conduct has persuaded much of the continent that coexistence with contemporary Kremlin doctrine requires deterrence on a scale not seen since the Cold War. Every spectacular attack upon Ukrainian civilians reinforces that conclusion. Indeed the irony of Russia’s terror strategy is that it often strengthens precisely the Western military resolve she seeks to weaken.

There is also an economic dimension to this desperation.

Hypersonic missiles are not cost-efficient battlefield tools for routine urban bombardment. Russia’s industrial base, although adapted for wartime production, remains under immense strain from sanctions, labour shortages, technological bottlenecks and budgetary pressures. The use of scarce prestige weapons against civilian targets implies either that Russia wishes to maximise psychological impact at disproportionate cost, or that she increasingly lacks more effective operational alternatives. Neither interpretation suggests strategic confidence.

Furthermore, strategic terror rarely produces the political collapse anticipated by those who employ it. Ukraine’s experience since 2022 demonstrates that repeated bombardment of civilian infrastructure tends to deepen social resilience rather than dissolve it. Ukrainian society has adapted to prolonged air attacks with remarkable organisational endurance. Metro stations become shelters, cafés reopen beside damaged buildings, schools continue underground and municipal authorities restore essential services with increasing efficiency. Russia’s attacks unquestionably inflict suffering, trauma and death, but they have not broken Ukrainian national cohesion. If anything they have fused it more tightly together.

Consequently the overnight strike on Kyiv may ultimately be remembered less as a demonstration of Russian strength than as evidence of strategic exhaustion.

Great powers confident of victory do not usually need to advertise their power through spectacular attacks on civilian apartment blocks. They demonstrate power by achieving operational objectives efficiently and predictably. Russia’s turn toward increasingly theatrical forms of violence suggests that conventional battlefield progress alone no longer satisfies the political needs of the Kremlin.

The Oreshnik missile therefore symbolises something larger than military technology. It symbolises a government attempting to project inevitability while confronting the uncomfortable reality that after years of war, mobilisation and destruction, decisive victory remains elusive.

That is why the attack carries the unmistakable scent not of triumph but of desperation.