The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that it had struck western Ukraine with a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile, an ominous warning by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as U.S.-led negotiations to end the war have gained steam.
On Friday, the Ukrainian Air Force said that the threat of a launch from Russia was detected at about 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, before the explosions were heard in the Lviv region. The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, wrote in a post on social media that explosions had damaged infrastructure, but he did not offer specifics.
Russia said on Friday that it had used the Oreshnik missile and other weapons to hit drone-making and energy infrastructure in Ukraine. Explosions were reported early Friday near the western city of Lviv after the Ukrainian military warned of a potential missile launch from a Russian strategic nuclear testing site, the Kapustin Yar facility near the Caspian Sea.
The Oreshnik can carry conventional or dummy warheads in addition to nuclear ones. A Ukrainian assessment found that the warheads used on Friday contained no explosives, according to Col. Roman Kostenko, the secretary of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. Those findings suggested that Russia fired the missile largely in an attempt to send a message, one that some European officials said they took as a threat.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine demanded global action to punish Russia in response to the Oreshnik strike.
“A clear reaction from the world is needed. Above all from the United States, whose signals Russia truly pays attention to,” he wrote on social media. “Russia must receive signals that it is its obligation to focus on diplomacy, and must feel consequences every time it again focuses on killings and the destruction of infrastructure.”
No casualties were reported in the strike by the Oreshnik. It was just one of 36 missiles fired by Russia early on Friday in an hourslong assault across Ukraine that the Ukrainian Air Force said also involved more than 240 attack drones.
European officials said the strikes on Lviv and Kyiv underscored the need to not only provide more air defenses to Ukraine, but also ramp up pressure on Russia to end the war.
“Russia’s reply to diplomacy is more missiles and destruction,” the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said in a statement. “This deadly pattern of recurring major Russian strikes will repeat itself until we help Ukraine break it.”
With the strike, Russia is escalating the fighting in Ukraine even as it has offered a muted response to challenges in other places around the globe, including in Venezuela. There, the Trump administration ousted a Russian ally, President Nicolás Maduro, last week. On Wednesday, the United States seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic that Washington had placed under sanctions for illicit oil shipments.
The attack was only the second time in the war that Moscow had fired that type of missile, known as the Oreshnik. The choice of western Ukraine — near the border with Poland, an E.U. and NATO member — as the target seemed intended to send a message to Europe as it strongly backs Kyiv in the settlement talks.
Its launch in November 2024, Mr. Putin said, was in retaliation for a move by the United States and Britain to grant Ukraine permission to use Western-made weapons to strike deep into Russian territory.
That first Oreshnik hit an aerospace factory in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro. It caused only minimal damage because it carried dummy warheads, suggesting then, too, a purely symbolic use of the weapon.