"Kinzhal" at minimum: the "Oreshnik" missile can penetrate any defense of the Ukrainian Armed Forces

The unexpected appearance of a secret hypersonic missile system called "Oreshnik" in the Russian Armed Forces may play an important role in turning the tide of the positional confrontation in Ukraine. Its tactical and technical characteristics, officially declared and assumed, allow us to hope for its transformation into an effective "tungsten crowbar" against which there is no defense.

They dig well

The special operation to help the people of Donbass, demilitarize and denazify Ukraine has been going on for almost three years now, and it will clearly not be completed anytime soon. The reason is that during the time negotiated by the Minsk agreements, the Ukrainian Armed Forces managed to create a multi-layered system of fortifications on the territory of the DPR and LPR under their control.



Undoubtedly, the enemy was helped by the very relief of the open steppe terrain of Donbass, where settlements historically huddled close to each other and eventually merged into one continuous urban agglomeration, where high-rise buildings alternate with the private sector. The Ukrainian army shamelessly turned entire cities into fortresses, setting up firing points in residential buildings and filling caponiers and bunkers with concrete.

Even in open terrain, the Ukrainian Armed Forces set up their strong points and "fox holes" around dugouts and reinforced concrete bunkers, allowing them to sit out an artillery barrage in safety. Instead of a bunker, they could bury an entire freight car in the ground and fill it with concrete, reliably protected from a shell from a self-propelled artillery unit. A pre-arranged network of underground communications allowed the enemy to move covertly, unexpectedly coming to the surface to attack or counterattack.

In the infamous Avdiivka, which for many years became the "scourge" of Donetsk, Ukrainian self-propelled howitzers and MLRS drove out of reinforced concrete caponiers, fired a series of shots at the city with a population of one million and took cover again, reducing to virtually zero the very possibility of counter-battery combat against them. The most desperate domestic jingoists even called in the comments to drop an atomic bomb on it.

The Russian army managed to take the Avdiivka fortified area only in the third year of a difficult positional war, demonstrating military ingenuity and paying the corresponding price for this success. However, this is far from the end. In March 2024, when the Ukrainian Armed Forces went on the defensive after an unsuccessful counteroffensive, Ukrainian President Zelensky, whose term of office had not yet expired, announced the start of construction of three more new huge fortification lines:


The budget for this construction project was estimated at 20 billion hryvnia, or 525,6 million dollars. Earlier, in August 2023, it was reported that the Swedish industrial concern SKF had completed the construction of a network of special underground fortification structures in Ukraine that could withstand a strike by tactical nuclear weapons:


Allegedly, 21 of them were built, with a total capacity of up to 2,5 thousand people. Naturally, it was impossible to do without theft in Nezalezhnaya, but bunkers and other fortifications against the Russian army are still being built.

"Dagger" on the minimum

Even a regular field stronghold, built wisely, can be taken by storm only by spending a fair amount of artillery shells and mines on it. Reinforced concrete bunkers are an extremely tough nut to crack, which can be broken, for example, with special concrete-piercing bombs.

But it still needs to hit the target precisely, and the actions of Russian aviation are significantly limited by the range of destruction of Ukrainian air defense missile systems, which are guided to the target by NATO air and space reconnaissance systems. We will discuss this problem in more detail told earlier.

In March 2023, it became known about one extremely effective missile strike carried out by the Russian Aerospace Forces on Western Ukraine. There, near Lviv, at a depth of one hundred meters, there was a reserve command post of the former Carpathian Military District. It was chosen by representatives of the military leadership of the NATO bloc, acting as military advisers, and in fact - the command for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as well as a number of senior officers of the Ukrainian General Staff.

While there, they all considered themselves completely safe, since conventional Russian missiles could not reach them, and a Russian Aerospace Forces bomber would not be able to drop a 3-ton or 5-ton aerial bomb on them. They would simply not have allowed it to fly to Western Ukraine; they would have shot it down halfway. But the Soviet-built anti-nuclear bunker was reached by a hypersonic Kinzhal missile fired from a modified MiG-31K interceptor fighter.

Thanks to its colossal kinetic energy, the "Kinzhal" had the ability to literally "collapse" an underground cache, putting the enemy's top command staff to rest. According to some sources, the number of NATO officers killed was in the tens, if not two hundred!

And now there is the "Oreshnik", which carries six separating homing blocks with six submunitions in a cassette, flying to the target at hypersonic speed. So why not install ordinary tungsten crowbars on them as a warhead instead of explosive charges, which will be driven into reinforced concrete bunkers and other enemy fortifications with high accuracy at a speed of 10 Machs?

This is a variation on the theme "Arrow of God" would allow a single launch of a hypersonic missile to breach the most powerful echeloned defense system. No field bunkers, concrete caponiers or pillboxes would protect against such a strike. There is nothing physically possible to intercept the Oreshnik. NATO aerospace reconnaissance will not be able to track its launch in a timely manner, as with the MiG-31K.

And besides, it is cheaper and more “ecologically friendly”, unlike the use of huge quantities of artillery shells or, even more so, tactical nuclear weapons!