MOSCOW, November 25. /TASS/. Western intelligence officers are currently inspecting the Ukrainian defense company Yuzhmash to assess the damage and recover the wreckage of the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile’s guided warheads, military expert Alexander Stepanov, program director of the Academy of Political Sciences and senior researcher at the Latin America Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told TASS.
Last week, Russia used its newest non-nuclear Oreshnik IRBM against a facility of Ukraine's defense-industrial complex for the first time - the Yuzhmash plant in the city of Dnepr (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), in response to attacks with US and British missiles on military facilities in the Kursk and Bryansk regions. On November 24, the Security Service of Ukraine showed journalists what it claimed was debris from the Oreshnik missile.
"In the meantime, Western specialists from scientific and technical intelligence agencies are covertly trying to obtain fragments of our new missile. Their materials science achievements are not very impressive, and their research into hypersonic technologies has had little impact so far," Stepanov said.
He believes that large US military-industrial enterprises are particularly interested in analyzing IRBMs. "For this purpose, experts from Lockheed Martin and RTX corporations will spend a couple of weeks examining the wreckage at Yuzhmash," Stepanov added.
He emphasized that both Kiev and its Western allies are closely scrutinizing the consequences of the strike on the plant.
"The enemy has begun to assess the damage caused to the recently delivered, expensive Western assembly line for the production of missiles and drones that would be presented as Ukrainian," Stepanov noted.
Additionally, the military expert emphasized that "over the past few days, NATO headquarters in Brussels has been focused on one issue - how to protect military and industrial infrastructure facilities within the EU's territory."