russia cruise missile

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What to know about the long-range cruise missile Russia says it fired

Russian naval forces launched long-range cruise missiles on Tuesday evening from the waters off Sevastopol, a port city in Russia-held Crimea, according to expert analysis of video verified by The Washington Post.

Russia said the 3M-14 Kalibr cruise missile attack destroyed a major Ukrainian arsenal.

Understanding the weapons that have drawn the world’s attention since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

A v ideo filmed by a witness from the Sevastopol waterfront on Tuesday shows at least four projectiles being fired from the water. Geolocation of the video by The Post shows the missiles appear to be traveling northwest, away from the city. As the narrator recites the date and location, the camera pans to show his surroundings.

“We thought it was a plane flying,” the narrator says. “It’s normal that planes fly here. But shooting is something serious.”

Additional video filmed around the same time shows eight flares with long tails that appear to be airborne missiles flying over the Black Sea. Both videos were verified by The Post.

Footage shared by the Russian defense ministry on social media shows large fireballs emanating from a warship where the ministry said Russian forces had fired Kalibr cruise missiles toward military assets in Orzhev, a village outside of the city of Rivne. Rivne is located more than 200 miles west of Kyiv and would be within the range a 3M-14 Kalibr missile could travel if it was fired from Sevastopol.

The tightly cropped video first shows multiple large explosions in succession above a ship, while someone off camera counts, “First, second, third, fourth.” The video then cuts to a wider view of a sunset where the long tails of the eight missiles are visible. The Post was not able to verify the location of this launch.

What you need to know about hypersonic missiles, which Biden says Russia used against Ukraine

Video reportedly of a Russian Project 21631 Buyan-M small missile ship launching 8 Kalibr-NK cruise missiles from near Sevastopol. https://t.co/GcWqUpoXLh pic.twitter.com/VvU3l5yYCK — Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 22, 2022

“As a result of the strike, a large depot of weapons and military equipment of the Ukrainian troops, including those received from Western countries, was destroyed,” a statement on the ministry’s Telegram channel said.

U.S. officials said they could not confirm that the weapons had been used. Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the deployment of the missiles or the destruction of an arsenal near Rivne.

The Post could not independently verify Russia’s claim that a weapons depot had been destroyed.

Ian Williams, deputy director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he was nearly positive the videos showed the launch of 3M-14 Kalibr cruise missiles.

“These are Russia’s long-range naval sea-based cruise missiles, similar to the U.S. Tomahawk,” he told The Post in an email. “They use satellite navigation along with some onboard inertial guidance.”

“This was almost certainly launched by the Russian Black Sea Fleet,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser for the international security program at CSIS, said in an email. Kalibr missiles are “at the high end of Russian capabilities,” he added. “Russia uses them to attack the highest priority targets. They seem to be doing more of that in western Ukraine. It may be part of an effort to attack strategic targets, that is, targets that matter in the long war.”

The 3M-14 or SS-N-30A cruise missile , commonly referred to as the Kalibr missile, can be fired from ships or submarines toward land targets. It can travel a maximum range of about 1,550 miles, according to the CSIS Missile Defense Project.

3M14 Kalibr

Stabilizers

20 feet, 4 inches

6 foot person for scale

Pop-out wings

Control fins

The missiles, designed to penetrate the air defenses of stationary ground targets, fly autonomously and largely horizontally at low altitude, along preprogrammed waypoints. Their route can be updated midcourse via satellite communication. Cruise missiles can be highly accurate compared to ballistic missiles.

Low altitude

flight path,

by satellite

Approximate 1,550 mile range

Not to scale

3M14T Kalibr

flight path, parallel to

Low altitude flight path, parallel to ground

Tracks terrain

during flight

Route can be updated through satellites

The standard 3M14T land-attack missile reportedly contains a nearly 1,000-pound high explosive warhead. It is often used to attack storage facilities, command posts, seaports and airports.

Russia stuck barracks in the southern port city of Mykolaiv with a Kalibr missile earlier this month, the New York Times reported , killing at least eight Ukrainian soldiers who had been sleeping there. The region’s governor said at least 19 others were wounded.

A Pentagon official said at a background briefing Wednesday that the United States still assessed that Russia has “the vast majority” of its inventory of surface-to-air missiles and cruise missiles.

Russia first used the SS-N-30A Kalibr missile in Syria in October 2015, when it launched 26 missiles from Russian naval vessels in the Caspian Sea, at forces fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.

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How Russia Uses Low Tech in Its High-Tech Weapons

Investigators who examined the electronics in Russia’s newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters were surprised to find decades-old technology reused from earlier models.

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By John Ismay

WASHINGTON — As Russian forces fire precision-guided weapons at military and civilian targets in Ukraine, officers in Ukraine’s security service working with private analysts have collected parts of the crashed missiles to unravel their enemy’s secrets.

The weapons are top of the line in the Russian arsenal. But they contained fairly low-tech components, analysts who examined them said, including a unique but basic satellite navigation system that was also found in other captured munitions.

Those findings are detailed in a new report issued Saturday by Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world. The research team examined the Russian matériel in July at the invitation of the Ukrainian government.

The report undercuts Moscow’s narrative of having a domestically rebuilt military that again rivals that of its Western adversaries.

But it also shows that the weapons Russia is using to destroy Ukrainian towns and cities are often powered by Western innovation , despite sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Crimea in 2014. Those restrictions were intended to stop the shipment of high-tech items that could help Russia’s military abilities.

“We saw that Russia reuses the same electronic components across multiple weapons, including their newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters, and we didn’t expect to see that,” said Damien Spleeters, an investigator for the group who contributed to the report. “Russian guided weapons are full of non-Russian technology and components, and most of the computer chips we documented were made by Western countries after 2014.”

How Russia obtained these parts is unclear. Mr. Spleeters is asking the manufacturers of the semiconductors how their goods ended up in Russian weapons, whether through legitimate transactions or straw-man purchases set up to skirt the sanctions.

The investigators analyzed the remains of three types of Russian cruise missiles — including Moscow’s newest and most advanced model, the Kh-101 — and its newest guided rocket, the Tornado-S. All of them contained identical components marked SN-99 that on close inspection, the team said, proved to be satellite navigation receivers that are critical for the missiles’ operation.

Mr. Spleeters said that Russia’s use of the same components pointed to bottlenecks in its supply chain and that restricting the supply of SN-99 components would slow Moscow’s ability to replenish its diminishing stockpile of guided weapons.

“If you want to have effective control and make sure that the Russians can’t get their hands on them, you need to know what the Russians need and what they use,” Mr. Spleeters said. “Then it’s important to know how they got it — what networks? What suppliers did they use?”

The investigators found an overall reliance by Russian engineers on certain semiconductors from specific Western manufacturers, not just in munitions but also in surveillance drones, communications equipment, helicopter avionics and other military goods.

“Over time, the Russians kept going back to the same manufacturers,” Mr. Spleeters said. “Once you know that, it gets easier to target those networks.”

“Looking at the computer chips in the same positions across multiple circuit boards, they were always made by the same manufacturers,” he said. “You’d have different dates of production, but always the same manufacturer.”

The report also revealed sharp differences between Russia’s top-shelf weapons and those that Ukrainian forces have received from the United States.

Warring parties often examine captured military hardware for intelligence value. But the investigators said they were shocked by Russia’s apparent indifference to having so many weapons that an adversary could potentially reverse-engineer.

“This is late 1990s or a mid-2000s level of technology at best,” Arsenio Menendez , a NASA contractor who reverse-engineers guided weapon components as a hobby, said after examining photos of Russian military electronics taken by the researchers. “It’s basically the equivalent of an Xbox 360 video game console, and it looks like it’s open to anyone who wants to take it apart and build their own copy of it.”

By comparison, the U.S. Defense Department has standards that military contractors must follow to make it harder for adversarial nation-states to build their own versions of captured weapons.

To protect this operational knowledge, which the Pentagon refers to with the anodyne term “critical program information,” military directives require the use of anti-tampering technologies meant to secure the lines of computer code and instructions that tell a weapon how to find its target.

Publicly released Pentagon directives provide only an outline of the program’s scope and requirements, and further details are classified. Military officials declined to discuss any anti-tampering technologies that the Defense Department may require.

“You can build a mesh around a computer chip that if probed will delete the contents,” Mr. Menendez said, adding that such protections were used in commercial goods like credit card readers to reduce theft and fraud.

The Russian navigation system resembles the open-source architecture of GPS receivers, which is not subject to federal restrictions regarding the sale and export of defense articles, he said.

“A team of college electrical engineering majors could build this,” he said.

The hodgepodge of parts that Russia uses to build its guided weapons may also help explain why its cruise missiles are sometimes not very accurate , Mr. Menendez said.

Errors made by nonstandard GPS units in processing satellite signals can ultimately cause a cruise missile to miss its target by a wide margin.

The Russian approach to weapons electronics appears to be “if you can’t keep up, steal the tech and do your best with it,” Mr. Menendez said.

John Ismay is a Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau and a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer. More about John Ismay

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The top American military commander in Europe warned that Ukraine could lose the war with Russia  if the United States did not send more ammunition to Ukrainian forces, and fast.

Ukrainian lawmakers passed a mobilization law aimed at replenishing the nation’s exhausted and depleted fighting forces .

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, met in Beijing . The visit came days after the United States threatened new sanctions against Chinese companies if they aided Russia’s war in Ukraine.

A U.S. Lawmaker Speaks Out : Representative Chuck Edwards, a Republican from North Carolina, has emerged as a vocal proponent of U.S. aid to Ukraine in a party that has grown hostile to it. He discussed his recent trip there  in a Q. and A.

Hollowing Out a Generation: Ukraine desperately needs new recruits, but it is running up against a critical demographic constraint long in the making: It has very few young men .

Conditional Support: Ukraine wants a formal invitation to join NATO, but the alliance has no appetite for taking on a new member  that would draw it into the biggest land war in Europe since 1945.

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Russia fires 30 cruise missiles at Ukrainian targets; Ukraine says 29 were shot down

Kremlin-installed authorities in Crimea said eight train cars had derailed on Thursday due to an explosion. Russian state media reported the train was carrying grain. (May 18)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Police Press Office, fragments of a Russian rocket which was shot down by Ukraine’s air defence system are seen after the night rocket attack in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, Thursday, May 18, 2023. (Ukrainian Police Press Office via AP)

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In this photo released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, May 18, 2023, Russian soldiers prepare a 152 mm self-propelled gun Giatsint-S to fire toward Ukrainian position at an undisclosed location. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

Emergency workers load a body of a local resident, who was killed during a rocket attack, into a car in the village of Tsyrkuny, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Thursday, May 18, 2023. (Andrii Marienko)

A damaged private house and car are seen in the village of Tsyrkuny, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Thursday, May 18, 2023. (Andrii Marienko)

Investigators stand at derailed train cars carrying grain next to the railroad track, Crimea, Thursday, May 18, 2023. Quoting a source within the emergency services, state news agency RIA Novosti said that the incident occurred not far from the city of Simferopol. The Crimean Railway reported that the derailment was caused by “the interference of unauthorized persons” and that there were no casualties. (AP Photo)

Derailed train cars carrying grain are seen next to the railroad track, Crimea, Thursday, May 18, 2023. Quoting a source within the emergency services, state news agency RIA Novosti said that the incident occurred not far from the city of Simferopol. The Crimean Railway reported that the derailment was caused by “the interference of unauthorized persons” and that there were no casualties. (AP Photo)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia fired 30 cruise missiles against different parts of Ukraine early Thursday in the latest nighttime test of Ukrainian air defenses, which shot down 29 of them, officials said.

One person was killed and two were wounded by a Russian missile that got through and struck an industrial building in the southern region of Odesa, according to Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson for the region’s military administration.

Amid the recently intensified Russian air assaults, China said its special envoy met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during talks in Kyiv earlier this week with Ukraine’s chief diplomat.

Beijing’s peace proposal has so far yielded no apparent breakthrough in the war . Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Thursday that the warring parties needed to “accumulate mutual trust” for progress to be made.

Ukrainian officials sought during the talks to recruit China’s support for Kyiv’s own peace plan, according to Ukraine’s presidential office. Zelenskyy’s proposal includes the restoration of his country’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian forces and holding Russian President Vladimir Putin legally accountable for the invasion in February 2022.

Leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations gathering in Japan on Thursday were expected to denounce Russia’s war and vow to keep helping Ukraine fight Moscow. They were to hold “discussions about the battlefield” in Ukraine, according to Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser.

A Western official said Russia had built “potentially formidable” defensive lines on Ukrainian territory, including extensive minefields, and had more than 200,000 troops along the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, though it is unlikely to possess credible reserves.

As Ukraine receives sophisticated weapons systems from its Western allies, the Kremlin has started losing warplanes in areas previously deemed as safe, the official said, while Kyiv has proven able to shoot down Russia’s hypersonic ballistic missiles — the most advanced weapons in Moscow’s arsenal.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military intelligence.

Meanwhile, Kremlin-installed authorities in occupied Crimea reported the derailment of eight train cars Thursday because of an explosion, prompting renewed suspicions about possible Ukrainian saboteur activity behind Russian lines. Russian state media reported that the train was carrying grain.

The state news agency RIA Novosti, quoting a source within the emergency services, said the incident occurred not far from the city of Simferopol. The Crimean Railway company said the derailment was caused by “the interference of unauthorized persons” and that there were no casualties.

Ukraine officials refuse to comment on possible acts of sabotage. Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson, Andriy Yusov, noted on Ukrainian television that Russian train lines “are also used to transport weapons, ammunition, armored vehicles.”

Overnight, loud explosions were heard in Kyiv as the Kremlin’s forces targeted the capital for the ninth time this month. It was a clear escalation after weeks of lull and before a much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive using newly supplied advanced Western weapons.

Debris fell on two Kyiv districts, starting a fire at a garage complex. There was no immediate word about any victims, Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv military administration, said in a Telegram post.

Ukraine also shot down two Russian exploding drones and two reconnaissance drones, according to the authorities.

The missiles were launched from Russian sea, air and ground bases, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian commander in chief, wrote on Telegram.

Several waves of missiles were aimed at areas of Ukraine between 9 p.m. Wednesday and 5:30 a.m. Thursday, he said.

Russian forces used strategic bombers from the Caspian region and apparently fired X-101 and X-55-type missiles developed during Soviet times, Kyiv authorities said. Russia then deployed reconnaissance drones over the capital.

In the last major air attack on Kyiv, on Tuesday, Ukrainian air defenses bolstered by sophisticated Western-supplied systems shot down all the incoming missiles, officials said.

That attack used hypersonic missiles, which repeatedly have been touted by Putin as providing a key strategic advantage. The missiles, which are among the most advanced weapons in Russia’s arsenal, are difficult to detect and intercept because of their hypersonic speed and maneuverability.

But sophisticated Western air defense systems, including American-made Patriot missiles, have helped spare Kyiv from the kind of destruction witnessed along the main front line in the country’s east and south.

While the ground fighting is largely deadlocked along that front line, both sides are targeting each other’s territory with long-range weapons.

The most intense fighting has focused on the battle for the city of Bakhmut and the surrounding area, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province, with a Ukrainian military official claiming Thursday that the army advanced up to 1.7 kilometers (more than a mile) there over the previous day.

At the same time, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the millionaire owner of Russia’s private military contractor Wagner whose troops have spearheaded the battle, claimed that Russian army units had retreated from their positions north of the city. Prigozhin is a frequent critic of the Russian military.

At least seven Ukrainian civilians were killed, including a 5-year-old boy, and 18 people were wounded over the previous 24 hours, the presidential office said.

Also, two people were wounded in a drone attack in Russia’s southern Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, the regional governor reported Thursday.

In a Telegram post, Roman Starovoit claimed Ukrainian forces dropped an explosive device from a drone on a sports and recreation complex.

In Russia’s Belgorod region, two people were killed in Ukrainian shelling of the village of Nizhnee Berezovo, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the border, according to Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov.

Jill Lawless in London and Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine