Putin fires hypersonic missile at Ukraine: Russia steps up war of attrition with another strike

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Russia unleashed its ‘unstoppable’ Kinzhal hypersonic missiles for the first time in Ukraine, the defence ministry said today, destroying a weapons storage site in the country’s west on Friday.

Russia has never before admitted using the high-precision weapon in combat, and state news agency RIA Novosti said it was the first use of the Kinzhal hypersonic weapons during the conflict in pro-Western Ukraine.

Moscow claims the ‘Kinzhal’- or Dagger – is ‘unstoppable’ by current Western weapons. The missile, which has a range of 1,250 miles, is nuclear capable. This was a conventional strike.

‘The Kinzhal aviation missile system with hypersonic aeroballistic missiles destroyed a large underground warehouse containing missiles and aviation ammunition in the village of Deliatyn in the Ivano-Frankivsk region’, the Russian defence ministry said Saturday. 

Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov also said that the Russian forces used the anti-ship missile system Bastion to strike Ukrainian military facilities near the Black Sea port of Odesa.

Russia reportedly first used the weapon during its military campaign in Syria in 2016 to support the Assad regime, although it was unclear if this was the same model. Some of the most intense bombing came in 2016 during the battle for Aleppo, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has termed the missile ‘an ideal weapon’ that flies at 10 times the speed of sound and can overcome air-defence systems.

Deliatyn, a village in the foothills of the picturesque Carpathian mountains, is located outside the city of Ivano-Frankivsk. The region of Ivano-Frankivsk shares a 30-mile long border with NATO member Romania. 

The strike comes as Ukraine’s forces continue to put up a fierce resistance against Putin’s invading armies, which have been forced to resort to seemingly indiscriminate artillery strikes on population centres.

Moscow’s troops have been stalled for days. Kyiv has claimed the invaders have suffered almost 15,000 casualties.

American sources estimate the number is lower, saying that 7,000 Russian troops have died so far in the fighting, including four major generals and a number of other senior officers.

Reports on Saturday said that a fifth Russian general had been killed.

The Kinzhal missile was one of an array of new weapons Putin unveiled in his state-of-the-nation address in 2018, although there have been reports of its use before then.

In June last year Russia mounted a massive military show of strength to taunt British forces in the eastern Mediterranean. MiG-31K supersonic warplanes carrying the hypersonic Kinzhals were deployed in a drill from Putin’s airbase in Syria.

Reports in the state run media made clear the exercises were specifically timed to coincide with the British Royal Navy’s deployment of a strike group led by aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Today, the Russian defence ministry also said it had deployed Bastion coastal missiles at electronic intelligence centres in the Odessa region.

In December 2021, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the appearance of a separate aviation regiment armed with MiG-31K aircraft with the Kinzhal hypersonic missile.

Earlier Putin said that the country began to create hypersonic weapons ‘in response to the US deployment of a strategic missile defence system.’

Russia’s announcement of the missile strike came as Kyiv’s army high command claimed to have killed a fifth Moscow general  since the war in Ukraine began. 

Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev was one of Vladimir Putin’s most senior commanders, in charge of the 8th All-Military Army of the Kremlin’s vast Southern Military District.

Moscow did not initially confirm his death in keeping with most previous claims of the ‘liquidation’ of Generals.

Ukraine now claims to have killed five holding the rank of General.

‘As a result of fire on the enemy by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the commander of the 8th All-Military Army of the Southern Military District of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvishev was killed,’ said a statement from the army general staff in Kyiv.  

The statement did not say where he was killed but other accounts claimed it was in the village of Chornobaivka, Kherson Region. This was attributed to Vadym Denysenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister.

The Ukrainians also claimed that wounded Russian soldiers have filled all hospital facilities in Gomel city in Belarus.

‘All health institutions with surgical departments are involved in the admission and treatment of the wounded occupiers,’ said the Ukrainian general staff.

‘Surgeons are working around the clock.All scheduled operations of Belarusian citizens are either cancelled or postponed indefinitely. A high death rate is recorded among the severely wounded Russian invaders.’

Meanwhile, more than 1,300 people – including women and babies – are still feared trapped in the bombed ruins of a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol as rescue efforts continue to be hampered by constant Russian shelling.

The helpless casualties were yesterday forced to spend a third night entombed in the basement of the destroyed Drama Theatre which was hit by Putin’s forces on Wednesday.

Their prospects of survival are growing bleaker by the day, with no supplies and Russian troops firing at rescuers trying to dig through the rubble.

Last night a local MP said those inside were forced to dig from within the wreckage because rescue attempts had been thwarted by ongoing airstrikes.

But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who branded Russia’s attack as ‘outright terror’, last night vowed to continue the rescue mission.

‘Hundreds of Mariupol residents are still under the debris. Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue the rescue work,’ he said.

Russian troops have now reached the city centre and civilians remain hiding in bunkers while fighters battle on the streets.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said: ‘Tanks and machine gun battles continue. There’s no city centre left. There isn’t a small piece of land in the city that doesn’t have signs of war.’

The devastating losses across Ukraine have sparked a poignant protest in Lviv, where 109 empty prams were arranged in solemn rows to mark the number of children killed since Russia invaded.

Local authorities said more than 130 survivors have emerged from the rubble of the Mariupol theatre which was being used as the ravaged port city’s biggest civilian bomb shelter.

But they said that those saved represented just one tenth of the civilians still trapped within the refuge which miraculously withstood the blast. 

Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova said: ‘According to our data there are still more than 1,300 people there who are in these basements, in that bomb shelter. We pray that they will be alive but so far there is no information about them.’

Former governor MP Serhiy Taruta said he fears many survivors will die because the city’s emergency services have been destroyed by Russian troops.

‘Services that are supposed to help are demolished, rescue and utility services are physically destroyed. This means that all the survivors of the bombing will either die under the ruins of the theatre, or have already died,’ he wrote on Facebook.

He said those trapped had been left to dig their way out of the collapsed three-storey building.

‘People are doing everything themselves. My friends went to help but due to constant shelling it was not safe.’

However Mariupol MP Dmytro Gurin insisted that while the rescue mission had been hampered by constant Russian attacks, efforts were still under way. 

One woman said the strike had taken place while those sheltering beneath the theatre were cooking and only around 100 had time to flee. 

Nick Osychenko, the CEO of a Mariupol TV station, said as he fled the city with six members of his family, aged between 4 and 61, he saw dead bodies on nearly every block.

‘We were careful and didn’t want the children to see the bodies, so we tried to shield their eyes,’ he said. ‘We were nervous the whole journey. It was frightening, just frightening.’

Russia has denied responsibility for the devastating strike which was branded a ‘war crime’ and sparked global outrage.

After an agonising first night of uncertainty following the bombing, Ukrainian officials revealed on Thursday that they were hopeful that the majority within had survived.

Rescuers said that while the entrance to the basement had caved in, the relatively modern shelter had remained intact.

But Miss Denisova said that while some had survived, the situation remained unclear.

She said there was ‘currently no information about the dead or wounded under the rubble’ and called the attack ‘an act of genocide and a terrible crime against humanity’.

Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov branded the Russian pilot behind the bombing a ‘monster’.

But the Kremlin’s UN ambassador Vasily Nebenzya yesterday denied that Russia had targeted the shelter. 

Meanwhile feared Chechen special forces are fighting house-to-house in the besieged port city.

Video said to have been released by pro-Putin Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov shows heavily armed fighters from the region pounding a high-rise building in the bombed-out city during a fierce gunfight with Ukrainian soldiers.

The propaganda video then cuts before showing some of the Chechen fighters emerging from the building with children in their arms while supposedly ‘liberating’ civilians.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday that its troops have now entered the city and are fighting in the centre, amid fears that it could soon fall into Putin’s hands after three weeks of shelling weakened the defences. If the city does fall, it will be the largest captured so-far – albeit at the cost of near-totally destroying it. 

Svitlana Zlenko, who said she left the city with her son on Tuesday this week, described how she spent days sheltering in a school building – melting snow to cook pasta to eat while living in constant terror of Russian bombs which flew overhead ‘every day and every night’.  

She described how a bomb hit the school last week, wounding a woman in the hip with a piece of shrapnel. ‘She was lying on the first floor of the high school all night and prayed for poison so that she would not feel pain,’ Svitlana said. ‘[She] was taken by the Red Cross within a day, I pray to God she is well.’

She added: ‘There is no food, no medicine, if there is no snow with such urban fights, people will not be able to go out to get water, people have no water left. Pharmacies, grocery stores – everything is robbed or burned.

‘The dead are not taken out. Police recommend to the relatives of those who died of a natural death, to open the windows and lay the bodies on the balcony. I know you think you understand, but you will never understand unless you were there. I pray that this will not happen again in any of the cities of Ukraine, or of the world.’

Despite the pleas, shelling was well underway in other Ukrainian cities on Friday – with Lviv, in the west of the country, the capital Kyiv, and Kharkiv, in the east, coming under fire.  

The war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin ground into its fourth week as his troops have failed to take Kyiv – a major objective in their hopes of forcing a settlement or dictating the country’s future political alignments.

But back home in Moscow, Putin today gave a tub-thumping speech to tens of thousands of banner-waving Russians in an attempt to drum up support for his stalled invasion.