It’s now at 100 injured and 4 killed. Targets included
- a supermarket
- shopping center
- office center
- dormitory
- service station
- garage,
- parked vehicles
- multiple warehouses
- headquarters of the Ukrainian post office
- The National Art Museum (only the building damaged, the collection not affected)
- Kyiv Opera House
- Ukrainian House
- Chernobyl museum
- the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium
The Oreshnik didn’t target Kyiv, it targeted a small town Bila Tserkva 50 miles south of Kyiv.
https://kyivindependent.com/russian-attack-may-24-2026/
That was with their other missiles - short distance ballistic and cruise missiles and drones.
And you can be sure that many were shot down. We get the figures later on about numbers shot down, those are shared publicly.
As for the Oreshnik it seems to have done very little when it hit the small town of Bila Tserkva.
The Oreshnik hit a garage complex and set three garages on fire.
It also hit a garage complex in Dnipro the first time it was used. Perhaps they do that because a garage complex covers enough area so there’s a chance that several of the garages could be hit, since they can’t target the rods?
It might have caused other damage. That’s just early reports.
But it’s not able to do much. Very low precision, unlikely to get half the projectiles within 100 meters of the intended target. May be far less accurate than that.
And that’s a challenge they can’t really solve unless they add a way for it to slow down during re-entry, because the lack of precision comes from the plasma cloud that surrounds it during re-entry. It’s like the way the Artemis astronauts were out of communication for a few minutes during re-entry. That’s when they need to do the course adjustments for a precise target. And for tungsten rods designed to be aerodynamic and keep fast rather than a heat shield designed to slow down quickly, the plasma continues all the way through until they hit the ground.
QUOTE STARTS
At hypersonic speeds, a missile’s warhead is surrounded by a plasma cloud in the dense layers of the atmosphere, severely disrupting radio signal transmission and reception. Some progress has been made in addressing this. For example, the U.S. Pershing II medium-range missile — believed by Soviet leaders to be specifically designed for high-precision “decapitation” strikes against them — reportedly achieved a CEP of 30–40 meters at atmospheric reentry speeds of 8–10 Mach. This was accomplished by augmenting its inertial system with a guidance complex that used active radar to compare real-time terrain data with a preloaded map of the area. However, to use this system, the warhead had to slow to Mach 3 during the final approach, and even this level of accuracy was insufficient for effective non-nuclear strikes.
Subsequent U.S. tests revealed the immense challenges of using GPS for hypersonic navigation and fine-tuning missile trajectories under extreme g-forces. Although these problems were deemed theoretically solvable, highly accurate strategic missiles with non-nuclear warheads, intended as part of the Prompt Global Strike program, were never developed.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/05/introducing-the-oreshnik
Also likely not very good at penetration
QUOTE STARTS
For further comparison, the U.S. once proposed a “kinetic weapon” concept called “Rods from God,” which envisioned dropping 35-ton tungsten rods from orbit at Mach 10 to strike fortified bunkers. The resulting energy would be equivalent to an explosion of 48 tons of TNT. However, according to media reports, Chinese experiments later cast doubt on the presumed high penetration capability of such weapons, as the tungsten projectiles reportedly “burst” at shallow depths immediately after impact. While Meduza was unable to locate scientific studies showing these results, such issues with hypersonic warhead behavior are well-documented. Counterintuitively, improving penetration requires slowing the warhead down before impact.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/05/introducing-the-oreshnik
These are much smaller rods than those 35 ton rods
QUOTE
An MIRV on the Yars or Rubezh carries four warheads, meaning each warhead weighs no more than 300 kilograms (660 pounds).
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/05/introducing-the-oreshnik
So that’s a total of 1,200 kg and it was divided into 36 projecticles so that’s 33 kilograms for each rod. Or 1000 times less massive than those 35 ton rods. And they also don’t have the ability to slow down. So they likely can’t do much.
And from the photographs shown they clearly don’t make craters when they impact. Just able to damage the roof of a garage and start a fire.
QUOTE
Even if the full kinetic energy of the Oreshnik/Rubezh warhead were directed at the target, its effects would be similar to those of several Iskander-M missiles equipped with high-explosive fragmentation warheads. Meanwhile, a single Iskander missile is estimated to cost about $3 million, compared to the Yars ICBM, a distant relative of the Oreshnik, which was thought to cost approximately $30 million in 2011.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/05/introducing-the-oreshnik
But in reality each warhead seems more like equivalent to a Shahed than an Iskander. But one without the ability to hit specific targets.
And cost of $30 million in 2011. That’s $44.41 milion today.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2011?amount=30
So each “bullet” costs Russia likely over $1 million dollars.
It’s just for show.
