Russia Has Launched a Barrage Of Its ‘Invincible’ Hypersonic Missiles Into Ukraine

Moscow fired a barrage of missiles at Ukraine on Thursday that included six of its advanced hypersonic missiles, which the Kremlin has hailed as “invincible” and a superweapon to cow NATO.

Russia fired 81 missiles and 47 of them hit their targets, killing at least six people and damaging infrastructure across the country, including knocking out external power at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Six of the 81 missiles were hypersonic, a weapon Kyiv has said it can’t shoot out of the sky due to their incredible speed and maneuverability.

The six missiles were Kh-47M2 Kinzhals, which means “Dagger” in Russian. NATO calls the missile the Killjoy. They’re believed to be capable of carrying a nuclear payload, though the ones that struck Ukraine on Thursday were standard munitions. Unlike other hypersonic weapons, the Kinzhals are launched by jets in the air.

Anything that flies faster than Mach 5 is considered hypersonic and Moscow has said that the Kinzhals can reach speeds of Mach 10. Ground-based weapons expend a lot of fuel getting into the air before arching back towards their targets and speeding up, while the air-launched nature of the Kinzhals allows them to spend more fuel on speed rather than getting into position.

Once launched, hypersonic weapons like the Kinzhal are hard to shoot down. The newest kinds of hypersonics are also maneuverable, making them hard to knock out of the air by ground based defense systems.

Kyiv has become skilled at knocking Russia’s missiles out of the sky. It’s even deployed advanced weapons systems like the German IRIS-T which is great at locking onto suicide drones and cruise missiles and neutralizing them before they can hit their target. But even the advanced IRIS-T can’t fell a missile flying at hypersonic speeds.

According to Moscow, this is not the first time it’s used Kinzhals in Ukraine. Russia said it launched the missiles to blow up an underground weapons depot in March of 2022. 

Militaries across the planet are developing hypersonic weapons, including China and the United States. After Russia touted its Zircon in January, the Pentagon announced it had successfully test-launched its own hypersonic missiles. The U.S. has been desperate to develop and deploy the weapons but a report from the Congressional Budget Office in February said that the technology still has a lot of problems. In January, Russia said it had deployed another kind of hypersonic missile, the Zircon, on a frigate that was going to patrol portions of the Atlantic Ocean.

Skepticism about hypersonics has been as rampant as excitement. Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck told the Senate last year that Russia was going to have problems landing its missiles accurately. “I will tell you, originally, we thought they weren’t working at a rate that was as good as ours,” he said at the time.

But Russia is launching the missiles and accuracy isn’t a huge concern when your goal is to indiscriminately hit civilian targets and cause infrastructure damage, or even as a simple show of force and battlefield technological advantage. 

Despite concerns over hyping the hypersonic threat, Russia has shown it is willing and able to use them to avoid air defense systems.