Vladimir Putin attends a Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, 28 November 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE / GAVRIIL GRIGOROV / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN POOL

Russia has begun the mass production of the Oreshnik intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was first used in combat to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last week, Vladimir Putin told a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in the Kazakh capital Astana on Thursday.

In video footage released by the Kremlin, Putin said that several Oreshnik ICBMs were now ready for use, noting that Russia had already used them in response to attacks on Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk regions by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) last week.

Putin told the leaders of the CSTO, a military alliance of six post-Soviet states, that Russia would continue to respond to the AFU using Western-supplied weapons to attack its territory with the Oreshnik as well as with other missiles.

Boasting that the use of multiple Oreshnik missiles for a single strike would be comparable in force to the use of a nuclear weapon, Putin said that the General Staff and the Defence Ministry were currently selecting which targets to strike, including “decision-making centres” in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

Putin described the missile as a “cutting-edge medium-range system” that carried a non-nuclear hypersonic warhead, and which “no existing missile defence systems” would be able to intercept.