Well the clock is ticking 1 minute to armageddon if the West keeps provoking the bear read this analysis of the IRBM strike
I hope those deluded heads in the West read the warning
“This is an escalation,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “I really believe the situation is very dangerous.”
In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said, “Putin is the only one who started this war, a completely unprovoked war, and who is doing everything to keep the war going for more than a thousand days.”
He called the missile strike “yet another proof that Russia definitely does not want peace.”
The use of an intermediate-range missile drawn from Russia’s strategic arsenal was notable, Ukrainian and Western officials said. The target inside Ukraine was well within the range of the conventional weapons that Moscow has routinely used throughout the war.
But this time, Russia launched a longer-range missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads that is mainly intended as nuclear deterrence; that choice, the officials and military analysts said, signals a warning aimed at striking fear into Kyiv and its allies.
Fabian Rene Hoffmann, a weapons expert at the University of Oslo, said that from a Russian perspective, “what they would like to tell us today is that ‘Look, last night’s strike was nonnuclear in payload, but, you know, if whatever you do continues, the next strike might be with a nuclear warhead.’”
There was initially debate on Thursday over exactly what Russia fired at Ukraine. Ukraine’s air force along with Mr. Zelensky initially claimed it was an intercontinental ballistic missile, a weapon capable of hitting targets thousands of miles away, including in the United States. Ukrainian officials said the missile struck a military facility in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, though the extent of the damage was not immediately clear.
Senior U.S. officials and a Ukrainian official, however, said the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, not an ICBM.
Dimitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said that under protocol, Russia was not required to notify the American side in advance of the missile launch because the Oreshnik is not an intercontinental missile. But an automatic notification to the U.S. was triggered 30 minutes before the launch, Mr. Peskov told Tass, the Russian state media outlet.
The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed that it received that warning.
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