Moscow vowed to respond to Kyiv’s latest attacks on Russian territory with US-supplied Atacms missiles and inflicted more damage on Ukraine’s severely weakened power grid with its biggest drone strike in nearly three years of all-out war.
In a sign of increasingly hostile relations with London, Moscow expelled a British diplomat on suspicion of conducting espionage activity on Tuesday and banned several British government ministers, businessmen and journalists from entering Russia.
Washington and London gave Kyiv permission last week to strike military targets in Russia with Atacms ballistic missiles and British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. In response, Moscow hit a defence plant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro with what it described as a new and experimental intermediate-range ballistic missiles called “Oreshnik”.
Russia acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that Ukraine had targeted an airfield and an advanced S-400 air defence system in the border region of Kursk with Atacms, but said most of the missiles were shot down and damage and casualties caused were minimal. Reports and photographs circulating online suggest the S-400 system was destroyed and several Russian servicemen were killed.
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The Russian ministry of defence said it was “managing the situation and retaliatory actions are being prepared”.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said last week that he reserved the right to use Oreshnik again and claimed his military had a stock of the missiles ready for use. He and other Russian officials have warned that Ukrainian strikes on Russia using western-supplied missiles would mean Nato states were directly involved in Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
Ukraine said the missile that hit Dnipro reached a top speed of 13,000km/h and had six warheads, each with six submunitions. Mr Putin claimed that no western air defence systems can stop the Oreshnik.
The Nato-Ukraine Council met at ambassador level on Tuesday in Brussels to discuss a missile strike that Kyiv and its allies said was a serious escalation of the conflict. They have also condemned deepening military co-operation between Russian and North Korea, and Pyongyang’s deployment of an estimated 12,000 troops to bolster Moscow’s forces near Ukraine.
Russia’s FSB security services said a second secretary in the political department of the British embassy in Moscow had been expelled for having “intentionally given false information when obtaining permission to enter our country” and after “signs of intelligence and subversive work threatening the security of the Russian Federation were uncovered.”
The foreign ministry in Moscow summoned the British ambassador to discuss the expulsion, which came a day after Moscow said its forces had captured a former British army soldier fighting for Ukraine’s international legion in Kursk region.
Russia also announced that 30 Britons, including deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, home secretary Yvette Cooper and other officials, military officers, businessmen and journalists, had been barred from the country because of the “Russophobic” and “reckless policies of the British leadership in supporting the ‘neo-Nazi’ Kyiv regime”.
Ukraine said Russia fired a record 188 explosive drones at its cities late on Monday and in the early hours of Tuesday, and its air defences intercepted 76 and lost track of 96 others, probably because they were downed by electronic jamming.
The most severe damage was in the western region of Ternopil, where elements of Ukraine’s already badly weakened power grid were again targeted.
“The consequences are bad because the facility was significantly affected and this will have impact on the power supply of the entire region for a long time,” said Ternopil governor Vyacheslav Nehoda, adding that about 70 per cent of the region had suffered blackouts because of the attack.
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