KYIV (Reuters) -The Russian missile that struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday flew for 15 minutes and reached a maximum speed of beyond Mach 11, Kyiv’s top spy agency said on Friday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Moscow struck a Ukrainian military facility with a new medium-range, hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik”.
“The flight time of this Russian missile from the moment of its launch in the Astrakhan region to its impact in the city of Dnipro was 15 minutes,” the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) said in a statement.
“The missile was equipped with six warheads: each equipped with six submunitions. The speed at the final part of the trajectory was over Mach 11.”
HUR added that the weapon was “likely from the ‘Kedr’ missile complex.”
Kyiv initially suggested Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, but U.S. officials and NATO echoed Putin’s description of the weapon as an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry on Thursday urged the international community to react swiftly to the strike.
NATO will hold an emergency meeting with Ukraine at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss Moscow’s strike, a NATO source said on Friday.
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Toby Chopra and Jon Boyle)
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