Whats Behind Ukraine and Russias Missile Brinkmanship?

The low-lying clouds over the city lit up for a split second, video footage showed, then streaks of dozens of glowing warheads plummeted out of the sky.

Booms unlike anything the war-weary residents had heard before thundered through the streets of Dnipro, a central Ukrainian city with a population of about one million.

The main contours of the attack on Thursday morning soon came to light: President Vladimir V. Putin said Russia had test fired an intermediate-range missile from its arsenal designed to deliver nuclear weapons, though without the nuclear warheads aboard.

The Russian strike caused little damage, but it capped a dizzying week of tit-for-tat moves in the war in Ukraine, shifting focus from the ground assaults on the battlefield to a Cold War-style missile brinkmanship. In the previous two days, Ukraine had fired longer-range missiles provided by the U.S. and Britain at military targets inside Russia. Mr. Putin made clear that the Russian missile test was a response to those strikes — a warning to the West to reconsider military aid for Kyiv.

The long-range missile duels have been waged jointly with the fighting on the frontline, but are having little discernible influence on the ground, suggesting that they serve a political purpose rather than a military one.

Ukraine is hoping for military gains that will provide leverage in any cease-fire negotiations. Moscow is elevating threats of nuclear war before President-elect Donald J. Trump is inaugurated in January. Mr. Trump has expressed skepticism about continuing American military support for Ukraine and said he intends to broker a peace agreement in the war.

In Ukraine, the strike on Dnipro raised anxiety, but when it was over it had changed little in the war: Neither the U.S.-provided missiles Ukraine was recently granted permission to fire into Russia nor the experimental missile Russia sent back are available in sufficient enough quantities to have a significant military effect, analysts say.

But Ukraine is still at a significant disadvantage overall on the battlefield, where its outmanned forces are slowly retreating under intense Russian assaults.

Even with the new permission to strike deeper into Russia, “Ukraine is rapidly approaching a point where, if it does not address the manpower issue, then it will struggle to defend the length of the front,” the Royal United Services Institute, an analytical group affiliated with the British military, wrote of Ukraine’s prospects. Without more soldiers, the analysis said, “the collapse in fighting positions will accelerate.”

Russian assaults by Saturday had reached the outskirts of another Ukrainian stronghold, Velyka Novosilka, in the east, battlefield maps showed. And after weeks of fighting, Russian troops were close to surrounding the town of Kurakhove, threatening to encircle the Ukrainian garrison inside.

Speaking on Saturday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Mr. Putin had timed Thursday’s strike ahead of the coming U.S. presidential inauguration. Russia’s goal, he said, is to expel Ukraine from a pocket of Russian territory it holds before Mr. Trump takes office. The new missiles were part of this Russian plan, he added.

“I am sure he wants to push us out by Jan. 20,” Mr. Zelensky said, speaking of Mr. Putin. “It is very important for him to demonstrate that he is control of the situation.”

In Ukraine, the fear is Russia will seek to escalate in anticipation of talks, pursuing a strategy of placing as many threats as possible on the table before negotiating to take them away.

“Putin’s actions are not aimed at today or tomorrow, they are aimed at Jan. 20,” when Mr. Trump becomes president, Valentyn Badrak, a military analyst at the Center for Russian Studies, said on Ukrainian television. “He wants to influence Trump and bargain for more.”

Throughout the fall, North Korean soldiers began arriving in Russia and U.S. and Ukrainian officials say about 11,000 of them will join Russian forces in the southern Russian region of Kursk, where Ukraine launched an incursion in August. The aim is to expel Ukraine from the territory it seized.

Western nations said that bringing in combat troops from a third country represented an escalation by Moscow, and cited that as the justification for allowing Ukraine to use a type of American ballistic missile called an ATACM to fire into Russia. But the agreement is limited to the area in which North Koreans are deployed. The United Kingdom quickly followed suit with permissions to fire its Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia.

Ukraine lost little time in striking its first blows, hitting a Russian ammunition depot with American ballistic missiles on Tuesday and a command post with British cruise missiles on Wednesday.

Russia responded by formalizing a new doctrine that lowered its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, then fired the missile in a test launch.

What exactly was launched is a matter of debate. The Pentagon described the missile as based on a decade-old Russian design called RS-26 Rubezh. Mr. Putin said it was an experimental new design called Oreshnik.

On Friday, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, offered details of the weapon: It flew in at about 11 times the speed of sound and before impact released six warheads that broke into 36 small submunitions. Its flight time from the Astrakhan region of Russia to Dnipro was about 15 minutes.

The weapon also had one ability associated primarily with nuclear-armed missiles: the ability to release multiple, smaller warheads, the effect that lit up the early morning sky in Dnipro.

When each warhead can be aimed separately, which was not clear during Thursday’s strike, the smaller warheads are known as MIRVs, or multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles.

Ukrainian analysts, however, have said the damage in the aftermath of the strike appeared negligible.

Ukrainian authorities are investigating whether the missile carried only dummy warheads, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the Defense and Intelligence Committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. If the warheads did explode, they did so with only minimal force, he said.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Kostenko pointed to a photograph showing a crater caused by the impact of the strike. It was about five feet across, in a sidewalk still covered in autumn leaves and with no other visible damage nearby.

The small crater, he said, suggested that an object had hit the ground with force, but had not necessarily exploded. A similar crater could be created with about two pounds of high explosive, he said. A tiny payload.

“If the missile were really fired empty, we should understand it as entirely a demonstrative” strike, with no actual military purpose, he said.

Ukraine does not have air defense systems capable of intercepting such missiles. On Friday, Mr. Zelensky said his minister of defense had requested additional systems from Western partners to counter future strikes.

The American missiles Ukraine was allowed to launch into Russia will have some impact. They have forced Russia to move planes from airfields near the border, and could help stymie Russia’s offensive in the Kursk region.

But Ukraine has too few ATACMS to significantly harm Russia’s military logistics near the border, some military analysts say. The U.S. provided Ukraine with several hundred ATACMS, and some estimates suggest there are fewer than 100 remaining.

“The United States is unable to give us the required quantity,” Col. Serhiy Hrabsky, a commentator on the war for Ukrainian media, said in an interview. For now, he said, the math doesn’t add up for these missiles to make a difference in the war.

After the Russian missile launch on Thursday, a deputy Pentagon press secretary, Sabrina Singh, said the United States would continue arming Ukraine. American officials, she said, “take seriously rhetoric coming out of Russia, but our focus remains on Ukraine and supporting Ukraine.”

And Ukraine has no choice but to continue fighting, despite the latest threat of nuclear war implied by the Russian missile launch, Mr. Kostenko, the defense chairman, said. Ukraine will not alter how it is fighting the war, he added, including striking back at targets in Russia in self-defense.

“Ukraine should continue doing what it is doing,” he said. “You cannot fight the war in another way.”

Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.