Source: The Conversation – Canada
For the third time in Russia’s war against Ukraine, it recently launched the nuclear-capable missile Oreshnik. This intermediate-range ballistic missile has been deployed against Ukrainian cities on two other notable occasions, striking Dnipro in November 2024 and Lviv in early 2026. In each of these launches, Vladimir Putin’s highly touted weapon carried no nuclear warhead.
The latest alleged target was Kyiv, in May 2026, but the third Oreshnik landed some 80 kilometres to the south, in the small neighbouring city Bila Tserkva, where it demolished three civilian garages.
Putin framed the strike not as a miss but a test of the new missile — the same justification he used after the launch on Dnipro two years earlier.
Instilling terror
Without a nuclear warhead, Oreshnik’s destructive power derives solely from its kinetic energy, which makes it comparable to other high-speed ballistic missiles carrying conventional warheads. So why is Russia using these missiles, estimated to cost around US$50 million each, when it would be 10 to 30 times cheaper to strike Ukraine with conventional ballistic missiles?
This cost disparity reveals Russia’s strategic commitment to maintaining the weapon’s nuclear status at all costs — the missile functions less as a tactical weapon and more as a medium. And as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously noted, the medium is the message. Oreshnik’s strikes must be seen as part of a broader Russian strategy: nuclear terror.
Whenever the possibility of Russia’s nuclear use is discussed, experts are divided.
Some argue Russia’s nuclear threats must be taken seriously, pointing to the repeated Russian willingness to impose devastating destruction. Others have grown increasingly skeptical and question the current effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
An example of that skepticism is a recent assessment by The Institute for the Study of War, citing Ukrainian intelligence experts, that found the third Oreshnik strike might actually have been the fourth: the missile may have failed immediately after an unsuccessful launch.
After the first Oreshnik launch in 2024, experts from the Kyiv Scientific Research Institute of Forensic Expertise said the strike on Dnipro left Oreshnik remnants behind. They included Soviet-era parts manufactured in the 1970s, electronics produced in 2016–2018 and a “technologically obsolete” gyroscope responsible for missile co-ordination — Oreshnik’s biggest weakness.
Not deterrence
Even so, Russian nuclear intimidation should not be taken lightly. The Oreshnik is just one example of a strategy that extends beyond a single missile system — and its underlying logic is fundamentally different from the Cold War deterrence of the past.
Cold War deterrence was built on a certain, predictable threat: “If you attack, we attack.” Today’s nuclear intimidation, by contrast, feeds entirely on uncertainty. In fact, it evokes the idea that nuclear catastrophe in a “risk society” torn by war could happen at any moment, either caused by weapons or by war-related “accidents” at the occupied nuclear facilities.
It’s this uncertainty, rather than the certainty of retaliation, that produces terror. Deterrence was a type of Cold War communication among rival powers, but nuclear terror excludes a possibility of communication.
Nuclear power plant occupations
From the very first days of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nuclear intimidation has been a core element of its campaign. It began with Russian forces moving through the Chernobyl zone and escalated with the unprecedented military occupation of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
Russian forces withdrew from the Chernobyl zone in March 2022, after losing the battle for Kyiv. The occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is ongoing, its grounds used as Russian military positions.
The damage to Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement structure atop Reactor 4 — the site of the infamous 1986 disaster — perfectly illustrates the logic of Russian nuclear terror. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a recent Russian drone strike has compromised the steel structure — designed to contain the highly radioactive remains of the disaster — leaving it unable to perform its core containment function.
Russia denied responsibility, and because the New Safe Confinement structure is so enormous, measuring 108 meters high and 257 meters wide, the IAEA declined to assign blame: a drone could in principle have hit it by accident, it presumed.
Ukraine’s security service identified the drone as a Shahed-136, carrying a high-explosive warhead configured for maximum damage. Viewed against Russia’s longer record of assaults on Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, these factors make it difficult to attribute the strike to chance alone.
The power of nuclear terror
Just a month ago, another Shahed drone hit the Chernobyl zone — specifically, the Centralized Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility near the nuclear power plant.
At the end of May 2026, this project, developed by the American company Holtec International, finally completed a decade-long process of construction and testing.
Designed to store spent fuel from three Ukrainian nuclear power plants for up to a century, the storage facility was meant to enable Ukraine’s long-awaited nuclear independence from Moscow. Just one week after receiving its permanent operating license, it was struck by a Russian drone.
Russia has just carried out two of the war’s deadliest assaults on Kyiv. On July 2, missiles and drones left 31 dead in Kyiv and more that 100 injured. Four nights later, Russia launched 68 missiles and 351 drones at Kyiv and the region, killing at least 27 people, among them residents of Vyshneve.
Local reports linked an explosion to a munitions depot that set off secondary detonations, burning for hours and forcing more than 600 people to evacuate.
While the Oreshnik missile wasn’t deployed in these attacks, the strategic threat remains clear: as long as this uncertainty persists, the paralyzing power of nuclear terror is driven not by an actual blast, but by the looming, uncontrolled possibility of one.
Svitlana Matviyenko receives funding from SSHRC.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/08/russias-nuclear-strategy-in-ukraine-isnt-deterrence-its-terror/