President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Sunday that Russia used an Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile against the town of Bila Tserkva, fifty miles south of Kyiv, during the overnight wave — and named it the third operational use of the system since the November 2024 test against Dnipro. [1] The Ukrainian air force had issued a public Telegram warning forty minutes earlier, at 12:55 a.m. local time, that Russia might be preparing an Oreshnik launch; the warning was followed by an actual launch. [2] No NATO-aligned military has previously pre-announced an inbound Oreshnik in plain language and been right inside the same hour.

The paper's Sunday lead on the Kyiv wave framed the third operational Oreshnik as the credibility instrument both Moscow and Kyiv now treat as load-bearing. Vladimir Putin claimed at the November 2024 Dnipro test that Western air defenses could not intercept the system; the May 25 Bila Tserkva strike is the third opportunity for Western intelligence to assess that claim against operational data. The strike landed on a provincial town fifty miles south of the capital rather than on Kyiv itself, suggesting either targeting limitations or a deliberate signalling choice — either reading puts the Helsingborg ministerial's conventional-deterrence discussion into operational terms inside a single weekend. [1]

The next watch item is Pentagon corroboration. The Defense Department's public schedule for Monday morning does not list an Oreshnik briefing; no senior Trump administration official produced a Sunday statement on the wave or the missile identification through Sunday night. NATO's military committee has not been convened. Independent Western corroboration of Zelensky's third-launch attribution would graduate the public warning into a doctrinal data point for the alliance's eastern-flank planners; the absence of corroboration through Monday morning is itself the position the administration is holding while talking about a different war.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow