On the evening of January 8, Russian forces struck infrastructure sites in the Lviv region with a ballistic missile, according to the West command of Ukraine’s Air Force. Lviv mayor Andriy Sadovyi said the target moved along a ballistic trajectory at about 13,000 kilometers per hour. He described it as the first strike of this kind on Lviv since the start of the full-scale war.
Sadovyi said critical infrastructure was hit. According to him, emergency crews were putting out a fire at the site, while there was no information about casualties and, preliminarily, no damage to residential buildings or civilian sites in the city. He later added that a temporary gas shutdown affecting 376 subscribers in the settlement of Rudno was caused by an automatic safety system triggered by the blast wave, not by damage to a gas storage facility.
Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said that during the nationwide air raid alert there had been a warning about a ballistic threat, and that the launch was likely carried out from the Kapustin Yar test range in Russia. Ukraine’s Security Service displayed fragments of the fallen missile and said civilian targets had been attacked.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said the strike was retaliation for an alleged attack on the Russian president’s residence in the Novgorod region on December 29, 2025. The ministry claimed it used, among other weapons, the medium-range Oreshnik system and said the targets were facilities tied to Ukraine’s defense industry and energy sector.
Experts interviewed by Novaya-Europe differ in their estimates of the missile’s production scale, but agree on one point: its conventional, non-nuclear use appears questionable. Military analyst Pavel Aksyonov noted that such systems were designed primarily for nuclear warheads, which limits the importance of accuracy. Analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko called Oreshnik strikes extremely expensive and ineffective, estimating the cost of one missile at $80-100 million, compared with $1-1.5 million for an Iskander.
Researcher Maksim Starchak said the use of Oreshnik against Ukraine is mainly political and demonstrative. The experts note that there is still no confirmed evidence of the system’s full deployment, including in Belarus, and they view the strike on the Lviv region more as intimidation and a signal to the West than as a tool capable of materially changing the course of the war.