EU officials left ‘scrambling’ in wake of US silence on Russian hypersonic missile strike

Latvia has convened an emergency session of the UN Security Council following a Russian hypersonic missile strike on western Ukraine less than 70km from the NATO border, Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže announced on Friday.

A nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missile was used to target the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Thursday night in an attack described by Braže as “barbaric”, marking Russia’s second-ever deployment of the weapon.

There were coordinated attacks across Ukraine in the early hours of Friday morning, with 270 missiles and drones killing four and injuring 25 in Kyiv, damaging the Qatari embassy and plunging nearly 6,000 apartment buildings into darkness, the Kyiv Post reported on Saturday.

With temperatures dropping to -10C in the Ukrainian capital, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko warned residents to consider temporary relocation in light of the heating grid’s failure. Meanwhile, gas supplies were cut off in Lviv in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as Russia using “cold weather as a tool of terror.”

Zelensky urged global leaders to act without delay to shore up Ukraine’s air defences in light of the Oreshnik attack, calling for “a clear reaction from the world” and “above all from the United States, whose signals Russia truly pays attention to”.

The escalation has left Western officials “scrambling behind the scenes”, according to the Kyiv Post, with the US yet to issue an official comment, an omission that one senior Western diplomat said Russia would interpret as “permissive”.