Commentary: Putin escalates Ukraine war by a step, not a leap, with missile experiment

LONDON: Ever since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has tried to deter the West from supplying Kyiv with ever more potent weaponry by threatening retaliation and escalation of the war. On each occasion – the supply of short-range missiles, tanks, F-16 fighter jets, longer-range missiles – Moscow’s bluff has been called.
This week the Kremlin finally followed through on its threat. Some 72 hours after the United States gave permission to Kyiv to use long-range US, UK and French missiles on targets inside Russia, Moscow hit back with a strike on Ukraine of the likes we have not seen before – the first combat use of what Kyiv called a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
In the early hours of Thursday (Nov 21), Russian forces struck Dnipro, in south central Ukraine, with what President Vladimir Putin called an experimental Oreshnik missile and Ukrainian officials identified as an RS-26 Rubezh ICBM. The RS-26 is a test missile based on another Russia ICBM, but with a much shorter range.
Although it is listed as an ICBM under the 2010 New Start nuclear arms treaty, some analysts have questioned whether the RS-26 qualifies as one and Western officials have hesitated to call it as such. Further muddying the waters, the Russian president described the Oreshnik as intermediate range.
Either way, and whatever the name, the attack was a message.
A video purportedly of the strike, shows six explosions consistent with the multiple warhead a weapon like this is designed to carry. The impacts on the video suggest there was no payload at all let alone a nuclear charge.
This was first and foremost a warning.
Thursday’s strike looks like an elaborately staged attempt to demonstrate escalatory dominance – the ability to outbid the West up the retaliatory ladder all the way to nuclear war. Despite its repeated verbal threats and blood-curdling rhetoric, the Kremlin since 2022 has struggled to find actions that are more powerful than words to deter Western support for Ukraine.
Nobody can afford to take Russian nuclear sabre-rattling lightly. But what is curious about Moscow’s ICBM strike is how performative it was.
As a prelude reports began circulating in Ukrainian media on Wednesday that the Kremlin was preparing for a possible strike with an RS-26 from a site in southern Astrakhan, from where the attack was launched the following day.
There was also the temporary closure of the US embassy in Kyiv on Wednesday after an alert about a possible large-scale attack. Could the alert and the news reports have come from the same source?
The embassy on Thursday said it was informed of the strike “briefly before the launch through nuclear risk-reduction channels”. Even during this escalation, Moscow appears to have stuck to some safety protocols.
Russia has struck Ukraine with scores of other nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, such as Iskander and Kinzhals. Nevertheless, firing a strategic weapon at its neighbour is clearly an escalatory step.
For Moscow, it also has the benefit of exposing further vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s overstretched air defences. It has triggered Ukrainian calls for the US-built THAAD system, the most sophisticated anti-ballistic missile defence available, which Kyiv is unlikely to get soon if at all.
After threatening retaliation if Washington granted Kyiv approval to strike Russian territory with long-range weapons, the Kremlin on this occasion did not blink.
But, as Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Endowment pointed out on X, Putin’s characterisation of the missile attack as “testing in combat conditions” indicates it is one reversible step up the escalatory ladder, not a leap.
“It’s part of a broader Russian official strategy to obscure crossing thresholds with language that suggests the threshold isn’t fully crossed – or can still be reversed,” Baunov wrote.
The incrementalism suggests that finding the next escalatory step without alienating Moscow’s friends in Beijing or unsettling the Russian public, could prove as difficult for the Kremlin as this one.
With Donald Trump returning to the White House vowing to bring peace to Ukraine, or impose peace on it, Putin may not have to dwell on it for long.