Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an early Thursday morning address in Moscow, announced that Russia would launch a military action in Ukraine. NBC News reported that explosions were heard in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
The United Nations Security Council had just convened an emergency meeting Wednesday night.
Earlier, European and U.S. officials scrambled to penalize Russia on Wednesday, responding to its deployments of troops to eastern Ukraine with a cascade of economic sanctions.
As concerns grew that Russian aggression would escalate, Ukraine warned its citizens to avoid traveling to Russia and to leave the country immediately if they are already there. The move came after Putin said Wednesday that Moscow is “always open” to diplomacy, days after ordering troops into eastern Ukraine and recognizing the independence of two self-declared republics in the region.
The European Union was set to hold an emergency emergency meeting on Thursday, and was reportedly considering another round of sanctions on Russian individuals. Officials from the United Kingdom and United States also announced or threatened more retaliatory measures after they unveiled initial tranches this week.
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The Iskander has several different conventional warheads, including a cluster munitions warhead, a fuel-air explosive enhanced-blast warhead, a high explosive-fragmentation warhead, an earth penetrator for bunker busting and an electromagnetic pulse device for anti-radar missions. The missile can also carry nuclear warheads.[1][12][13] In September 2017, the KB Mashinostroyeniya (KBM) general designer Valery M. Kashin said that there were at least seven types of missiles (and "perhaps more") for Iskander, including one cruise missile.[14]
The road-mobile Iskander was the second attempt by Russia to replace the Scud missile. The first attempt, the OTR-23 Oka, was eliminated under the INF Treaty. The design work on Iskander was begun in December 1988, initially directed by the KBM rocket weaponry designer Sergey Nepobedimy, and was not significantly affected by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.[15][16]
The Iskander ballistic missile is superior to its predecessor, the Oka. The Iskander-M system is equipped with two solid-propellant single-stage guided missiles, model 9M723K1. Each one is controlled throughout the entire flight path and fitted with an inseparable warhead. Each missile in the launch carrier vehicle can be independently targeted in a matter of seconds. The mobility of the Iskander launch platform makes a launch difficult to prevent.
In November 2014, US General Breedlove stated that Russian forces "capable of being nuclear" had been moved into Crimea,[40] the Ukrainian peninsula which the Russian Federation had annexed in March, and the following month Ukrainian Armed Forces announced that Russia had deployed a nuclear-capable Iskander division in the territory.[41][42] Russian Foreign Ministry officials declared the right to deploy nuclear weapons in the peninsula, which is generally recognized as part of Ukraine, in December 2014[43] and June 2015.[44]
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