The head of Russia’s Chechnya region said Thursday a Ukrainian drone attack hit a police barracks, injuring at least four people.
Ramzan Kadyrov said on Telegram the drone damaged the building’s roof and windows and also caused a small fire.
The attack was the second to hit a police facility in the region this month, according to Kadyrov.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday it shot down a drone over Chechnya, as well as four drones over Kursk, three over North Ossetia and eight over Russia-occupied Crimea.
In Ukraine, the governor of the Kherson region said Russian drones attacked Thursday, with one injuring a man in the city of Kherson.
Missile warfare
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Russia would respond to Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles, which Russian defense officials said were used in a Wednesday strike on a Russian airfield in the city of Taganrog.
“The response will follow in a manner deemed appropriate. But it will definitely follow,” Peskov said.
A U.S. official said Wednesday that a U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded Russia could launch another of its experimental hypersonic ballistic missiles against Ukraine in the coming days, although Washington does not consider it to be decisive in the nearly three-year war.
Russia first fired the Oreshnik missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on November 21, in what President Vladimir Putin characterized as a response to Ukraine’s first use of long-range U.S. and British missiles to strike more deeply into Russian territory with Western permission.
“We assess that the Oreshnik is not a game-changer on the battlefield, but rather just another attempt by Russia to terrorize Ukraine, which will fail,” the U.S. official told reporters. There was no immediate response from Russia.
Putin had said that Russia might fire the Oreshnik missile again, possibly to target “decision-making centers” in Kyiv, if Ukraine keeps attacking Russia with long-range Western weapons.
The Russian leader has claimed that the Oreshnik is impossible to intercept and that it has destructive power comparable to that of a nuclear weapon, even when fitted with a conventional warhead.
Some Western experts have said the novel feature of the Oreshnik is that it carries multiple warheads that can simultaneously strike different targets — a capability usually associated with longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Nonetheless, the U.S. official downplayed the usefulness of the missiles, calling them “experimental” in nature and saying that “Russia likely possesses only a handful” of them. The official also said the weapon has a smaller warhead than other missiles Russia has deployed in Ukraine.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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