George Grylls
The Times
Dec 13, 2024
The sprawling factory in Dnipro bears the scars of regular Russian missile strikes. Some of the windows have been blown out and the concrete is charred on several buildings.
Last month the factory was hit by a Russian hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile, marking an escalation in the conflict.
“One of the largest and well-known industrial complexes from the Soviet Union, which today produces missile technology and other weapons, was hit in the city of Dnipro in Ukraine,” President Putin boasted in a live TV address.
Putin’s use of the Oreshnik missile was interpreted as a warning to the West, a response to Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory using US Atacms and British Storm Shadow missiles.
But the decision to target the Pivdenmash factory, known as Yuzhmash before Ukrainian independence in 1991, also betrayed the Russian president’s nervousness about a potentially transformative Ukrainian plan: President Zelensky’s dream of building a ballistic missile.
“The first Ukrainian ballistic missile was tested,” Zelensky announced shortly before the Oreshnik attack. “It was a positive test.”
Perhaps reasoning that Ukraine’s ambitions for Nato membership are likely to be thwarted by a Donald Trump-negotiated peace deal, Zelensky is examining a more thunderous way of discouraging Putin from further aggression.
Ukraine has already struck Moscow with homemade drones. But a domestically manufactured ballistic missile would offer a harder form of deterrence and, crucially, one that would not require western permissions.
In his “victory plan” presented to Ukrainian MPs a fortnight before the US elections, Zelensky said Kyiv wanted to assemble a “comprehensive non-nuclear strategic deterrence package”.
Following the Oreshnik strike, Russian propagandists claimed the 1,850-acre Pivdenmash factory had been totally destroyed. But on a morning in December, the headlights of workers’ cars pulling in for work suggested otherwise.
Speak to the residents of Dnipro and in conspiratorial whispers they will tell you of subterranean workshops beneath their city, fortified to survive American nuclear bombs.
“All you need to know is the Russians can’t get it,” says Tamara Ivanivna, 66, with a look of mirthful satisfaction, explaining that her father once worked at the plant.
During the Soviet Union, Dnipro was a closed city. Three enormous Soviet missiles rusting in one of the city’s central plazas are a reminder to older Ukrainians of what might have been. “If we had kept the missiles, we would have avoided the current mess,” says Ivanivna, walking with her granddaughter past the towering display.
In the 1960s Ukrainian engineers in Dnipro, nicknamed “Rocket City”, designed and manufactured an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting American cities from New York to Los Angeles, a technological breakthrough that resulted in the Soviet Union surging ahead of the US in the arms race.
The R-36 or “Satan” missile could soar into space, orbit the earth, then plunge back to terra firma with apocalyptic power, scattering chaff to avoid interception. Each missile carried ten atomic warheads, enough to kill tens of millions of people.
“The annual budget for Yuzhmash was larger than for entire Soviet republics like Georgia, Estonia and Moldova,” says Professor Vasil Shevtsov, 79, who is now into his sixth decade of lecturing about rocket science at Dnipro National University. “Yuzhmash was not just one of the world leaders in missile production, it was the world leader.”
At the end of the Cold War, however, the orders dried up and Dnipro fell on hard times. Yuzhmash, the state factory that once employed one in three families in the city, fell into disrepair. Scarcely believable today, Ukrainian scientists continued to co-operate with Russia even after independence, maintaining the R-36 missiles as part of a contract signed with Putin in 2006.
“The engines were made in Russia but everything else was Ukrainian,” says Shevtsov, reeling off a list of famous Ukrainian rocket scientists from Grigory Kisunko, the inventor of modern air defence systems, to Sergei Korolev, the visionary who put Yuri Gagarin into space.
Considering the extraterrestrial achievements of the previous generations of Ukrainian scientists, Zelensky’s desire for a ballistic missile to strike Moscow appears relatively modest.
In development for a decade, Hrim 2, or “Thunder 2”, would have an estimated range of 310 miles, putting the Kremlin itself in Ukrainian crosshairs.
“Believe me, there will soon be concrete results that not only Ukraine but also the Russian Federation will see,” said Yegor Chernev, Ukraine’s representative at Nato, earlier this year.
But there is scepticism abroad about whether Ukraine can build enough ballistic missiles to alter the power balance. A series of Israeli strikes on Iranian missile facilities earlier this year demonstrated the difficulty of sheltering large rocket factories from enemy bombardment.
“Facilities producing solid fuel motors or hosting planetary mixers would come under sustained attack from Russia,” says Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “It will be difficult to produce a MRBM [medium-range ballistic missile] or IRBM [intermediate-range ballistic missile] at the scale needed to be a useful conventional weapon.”
Nevertheless, Putin can ill-afford to underestimate Ukrainian firepower, having watched the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea fleet’s flagship guided-missile cruiser, sunk by a Neptune anti-ship missile built in Ukraine.
While a handful of Ukrainian ballistic missiles aimed at the Kremlin might be swatted aside, if they were supplemented by cheap and plentiful drones, they might just overwhelm Moscow’s air defences. To that end, Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian defence minister, has vowed to build next year 30,000 long-range drones capable of hitting the Russian capital.
Such is Putin’s determination to level Dnipro’s missile-building infrastructure, even the city’s rocket museum has been targeted. Having taught generations of Ukrainian scientists, Shevtsov believes the Russian president is mistaken if he thinks he can extinguish the glimmer of Ukrainian invention in the city.
“All species have evolved something that allows them to survive. Hares have long legs to run. Foxes have large ears to hear. What makes us Ukrainians unique? We have brainpower,” he says.
Additional reporting by Vika Sybir