Signal No. 67 · Third Oreshnik on Kyiv; Prague warns Baltic; Rutte's 0.25% blocked

On the night of 23–24 May, Russian forces launched a combined strike against Ukraine using one RS-26 Rubezh "Oreshnik" intermediate-range ballistic missile (launch site: Kapustin Yar, Astrakhan Oblast), two Kh-47M2 Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles, three 3M22 Zircon anti-ship missiles, 30 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, 54 Kh-101, Iskander-K and Kalibr cruise missiles, and 600 attack drones combining Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas, Banderol loitering munitions and Parodiya decoys — 690 aerial weapons in total. The Ukrainian Air Force, citing spokesperson Yurii Ihnat, confirmed the Oreshnik launch struck the Bila Tserkva district in Kyiv Oblast, approximately 80 km south of the capital. Damage in Bila Tserkva was recorded at the territory of a garage cooperative; per a Reuters review of footage from the impact site by Rollo Collins of the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), the Oreshnik warhead "appears to have split into 36 submunitions" — the first OSINT-corroborated indication of a submunition-dispensing payload configuration on an operational Oreshnik launch. As of 09:30 on 24 May, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that air defences had shot down or neutralised 604 of the 690 weapons — 55 missiles and 549 drones — with 16 missiles and 51 attack drones having hit 54 locations across Kyiv, Kyiv Oblast and the wider country. Two were killed and 87 wounded in Kyiv, with two further killed and nine wounded in Kyiv Oblast. The strike marks Russia's third operational use of the RS-26 Rubezh since the start of the full-scale invasion, following Dnipro on 21 November 2024 and Lviv Oblast on 9 January 2026.

The Russian Ministry of Defence confirmed the Oreshnik launch on its Telegram channel, framing the strike as retaliation for "Ukraine's terrorist attacks on civilian facilities within Russian territory" — a reference to the Ukrainian drone strike on the Starobilsk College of Luhansk Pedagogical University dormitory on the night of 21–22 May. Russian Emergency Situations Ministry (EMERCOM) declared search and rescue concluded on 24 May with 21 dead and 42 injured at Starobilsk; Russian President Vladimir Putin had on 22 May ordered the Defence Ministry to "submit proposals" for retaliation. Ukraine's General Staff stated that the drone strike had targeted "one of the headquarters of the 'Rubikon' unit in the area of the city of Starobilsk", referencing the elite Russian drone command unit, and that Ukrainian forces complied with international humanitarian law. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, on the Oreshnik launch: the strike "was probably meant to demonstrate 'strength' to the domestic audience, but instead it only confirms Putin's weakness". The 23 May presidential warning by Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Washington and European intelligence partners had shared data on a possible Oreshnik launch — paired by a US Embassy Kyiv security alert — preceded the strike. Polish military aviation was activated during the attack; the Polish General Staff confirmed no airspace violations were detected.

Damage in Kyiv was recorded across all ten districts, with the Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko characterising the strike as the largest in the capital of the full-scale war by number of impact locations. Three missiles struck a water-supply facility. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, designed by Iosif Langbard in 1939, sustained light damage from nearby explosions — the first damage to the building from hostilities since the Second World War, per Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha. The National Bank of Ukraine head office sustained damage; National Bank Governor Andrii Pyshnyi confirmed the bank would continue operations on Monday. Government buildings, the Kyiv Municipal Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Philharmonic, the National Art Museum of Ukraine, the Lukyanivska metro station, and the National Chornobyl Museum were damaged. The residential complex housing the Albanian Ambassador to Ukraine, Hernal Filo, sustained damage; Albanian Foreign Minister Ferit Hoxha denounced the strike as a "grave escalation".

The European political response converged on the FAC track. EU High Representative Kaja Kallas wrote on X that "Moscow reportedly using Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missiles — systems designed to carry nuclear warheads — is a political scare-tactic and reckless nuclear-brinkmanship" and announced that EU foreign ministers would discuss further measures against Russia at the 27–28 May Gymnich informal FAC in Lemesos, Cyprus. European Council President António Costa, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney issued condemnations. Merz on X called the Oreshnik use a "reckless escalation"; Meloni called the strike a "progressive rise in the level of weapons used"; von der Leyen confirmed further EU support for Ukrainian air defences. Macron separately held a Sunday phone call with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — his first call with Lukashenko in four years — which Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, visiting Kyiv on 25 May for her first "working visit" and meeting with Sybiha, characterised as "a warning" from Europe against further escalation. As of 22:30 CEST on 25 May, no statement on the strike had been issued by US President Donald Trump or by the White House. US Deputy UN Ambassador Tammy Bruce, after the 9 January Oreshnik launch on Lviv Oblast, had at the time called Russia's use of the Oreshnik a "dangerous and inexplicable escalation".

24–25 May second wave: On the night of 24–25 May, Russian forces launched a second-wave combined strike using nine Iskander-M/KN-23 ballistic missiles, 55 Kh-101 and Kalibr cruise missiles launched from Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers, one Kh-22 cruise missile from a Tu-22M3 bomber, four Kh-59/69 guided air-launched missiles and 298 strike UAVs — 367 aerial weapons in total, bringing the cumulative 48-hour Russian aerial-strike volume to 1,057. The Ukrainian Air Force reported as of 08:00 Kyiv time on 25 May that 246 of 262 drone targets had been shot down or suppressed, with 45 Kh-101/Kalibr cruise missiles downed and two Kh-59/69 disappearing from radar; ten drones struck nine locations, debris from downed drones fell at seven locations, with hits recorded at 22 locations across northern, southern and eastern Ukraine. The composition is materially distinct from the first night — no Oreshnik, no Kinzhal, no Zircon — and consistent with a return to the standard Russian saturation cadence after the political-apex strike of 23–24 May. In the same overnight window, the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed Russian air defences intercepted 110 Ukrainian fixed-wing UAVs across Russian territory, including Tula (16), Bryansk and Kaluga (14 each), Moscow and Tver (13 each), Belgorod and Kursk (10 each), Oryol (8), and seven over annexed Crimea — a Russian-side data point on the sustained Ukrainian deep-strike envelope tracked in Signal 2 below.

25 May Russian MFA upgrade: The Russian Foreign Ministry on 25 May issued a formal statement describing the 21–22 May Ukrainian Starobilsk strike as "the last straw" and announcing that Russia will launch "a systematic series of strikes in response" targeting "specific sites where UAVs are designed, manufactured, programmed, and prepared for use" — noting that such facilities "are scattered throughout Kyiv". The statement explicitly warned "foreign citizens, including personnel of diplomatic missions and international organisations, to leave the city as soon as possible." The MFA upgrade converts the 24 May MoD Telegram operational readout into a formal diplomatic instrument with an explicit evacuation warning, replicating the architecture of the 6 May Zakharova pre-Victory Day evacuation note but with a present-tense rather than conditional framing.

Signal › The 23–24 May strike combines the largest single Russian aerial-weapons launch against Kyiv recorded in the full-scale war with the third operational use of the RS-26 Rubezh, and is followed within hours by a 367-weapon second wave overnight 24–25 May, bringing the cumulative 48-hour aerial-weapons volume to 1,057 — the densest two-night barrage of the full-scale war. Two analytical points follow. First, the kinetic signature: 690 aerial weapons on night one yielded a 91.5% drone-intercept rate and a 61% missile-intercept rate, but the absolute residual — 16 missiles and 51 drones hitting 54 locations across central Kyiv, with three missiles striking a water-supply facility — indicates volume saturation as the main mechanism, with the Oreshnik functioning as the political signal rather than a decisive kinetic instrument. The night-two composition (no Oreshnik, no Kinzhal, no Zircon — a return to standard cruise-and-drone cadence) corroborates this reading: the IRBM/hypersonic concentration was the political-signalling moment, the standard saturation was the operational follow-through. The CIR/Reuters 36-submunition OSINT finding on the Bila Tserkva impact reframes the earlier "garage cooperative target" reading: a dispensing submunition payload pattern over a non-strategic Kyiv Oblast aimpoint is more consistent with a calibrated demonstration of submunition-dispensing capability — and with the Putin claim of "impossible to intercept" — than with either a miss or a counter-force objective. Submunition dispersal makes the Oreshnik a more credible area-effect weapon and complicates Ukrainian and NATO air-defence calculus. The Russian MoD framing — Oreshnik used for the third time against Ukraine, with the system already deployed to Belarus per official statements through 2025 — pairs the saturation strike with the 18–21 May Russia-Belarus unannounced nuclear forces exercise tracked in Signal No. 63 and Signal No. 65, and is reinforced by Tsikhanouskaya's 25 May Kyiv visit warning that Lukashenko's posture is shifting toward war-preparation rhetoric.

Second, the political response: Kallas's pre-emptive FAC framing, von der Leyen's air-defence commitment, the Macron, Merz, Costa, Meloni and Carney condemnations on Sunday, and Macron's separate Sunday phone call to Lukashenko sit against unchanged transatlantic silence — no White House statement on the Oreshnik launch had been issued by close of European day on 25 May. On the frozen-assets question specifically, the Russian Central Bank filed a second General Court of the EU claim on 25 May challenging the 24 February 2026 EU regulation that allows Russia's frozen sovereign assets (~$300bn estimated, mostly at Euroclear) to repay the EU's two-year EUR 90 billion loan to Ukraine — a procedural counter-move timed against the Lemesos Gymnich and the EU's broader Russian-asset deployment debate. The next test is whether the Lemesos Gymnich on 27–28 May produces specific instruments — additional sanctions packages, frozen-asset deployment notwithstanding the RCB legal challenge, accelerated air-defence transfers — beyond condemnation, with Article 42.7 mapping continuing in parallel from Signal No. 65. The further open variable is how the 7–8 July Ankara Summit communiqué addresses Oreshnik nuclear-signalling — alliance-level deterrence framework, EU FAC track, separate working-group deferral, or no surfacing at all are all on the table.

On the night of 23–24 May, drone operators from the Alpha Special Operations Centre of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) struck the Vtorovo linear production and dispatching station in Russia's Vladimir Oblast, located approximately 650 km from the Ukrainian border and operated by Russian state pipeline monopoly Transneft. The facility is a primary fuel-distribution node feeding Moscow Oblast oil depots and the Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo international airports surrounding the Russian capital. The strike triggered an 800 m² fire at the site, with Vladimir Oblast Governor Alexander Avdeyev confirming the fire near Kameshkovo had been extinguished. On the same night, Ukraine's Defence Forces separately struck the oil-loading berth of the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal in Krasnodar Krai. SBU Head Vasyl Maliuk: "The SBU is already preparing new special operations. The intensity of Ukraine's strikes on Russian territory will only increase. Our 'long-range sanctions' will continue to work." Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi reported on 23 May that in the first 23 days of May, Ukrainian drones had hit 13 major Russian oil facilities, with six of Russia's ten largest refineries having stopped processing crude oil. Separately, Russia introduced fuel rationing of 20 litres per vehicle in Sevastopol on 23 May citing "logistical challenges"; Reuters confirmed on 25 May that Russia's Syzran oil refinery on the Volga (8.5 mt/year, ~170,000 bpd) had halted operations after the 21 May Ukrainian drone strike on its CDU-6 crude distillation unit (>70% of plant capacity; repairs estimated to take more than a month).

Signal › The Vtorovo/Tamanneftegaz pair extends the SBU "long-range sanctions" framework into the same 48-hour window as the Oreshnik-anchored Russian saturation and the 24–25 May second wave described in Signal 1 — i.e. the kinetic exchange across the 23–25 May window is genuinely bidirectional. Three observations. First, target selection: Vtorovo as Moscow-region aviation fuel-supply node is a higher-order target choice than direct refinery strikes (which Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi reported on 23 May had affected 13 major Russian oil facilities in the first 23 days of May, with six of Russia's ten largest refineries having stopped processing) — it interdicts the distribution layer rather than the production layer. Second, the operative effects: Sevastopol fuel rationing, the Syzran CDU-6 shutdown (>1 month repair), and the Vtorovo strike indicate growing stress on Russian downstream fuel supply, pairing with the April-introduced Russian gasoline export ban (extended through end-July 2026). Third, the political signalling: Maliuk's explicit "long-range sanctions" framing places the SBU campaign as the formal Ukrainian parallel to the European sanctions track, with the explicit commitment to intensification — a posture statement going into the 27–28 May Lemesos Gymnich and the 7–8 June EU Defence Ministerial.

On Thursday 21 May, a Royal Air Force Dassault Falcon 900LX aircraft carrying UK Defence Secretary John Healey sustained continuous GPS signal jamming for the duration of its three-hour return flight from Estonia, where Healey had been visiting British troops participating in a NATO exercise near the Russian border. The jamming disabled satellite-based navigation for the duration of the flight, requiring the aircraft's pilots to revert to alternative navigation systems; on-board smartphone and laptop connectivity was disrupted throughout. The aircraft's flight path was publicly visible on aircraft-tracking websites at the time of the incident. The story was first reported by The Times on 25 May with BBC confirmation. A UK Ministry of Defence source described the activity to Sky News as "reckless Russian interference" while stating "the RAF is well prepared to deal with this activity". The MoD has not stated whether Healey's aircraft was deliberately targeted. The incident is the second known GPS-jamming event against an RAF flight carrying a serving UK Defence Secretary; the first, against then–Defence Secretary Grant Shapps's RAF aircraft near Kaliningrad in March 2024, was also a Dassault Falcon 900LX.

The disclosure pairs with the UK MoD's 22 May statement that two Russian aircraft — a Su-35 and a Su-27 — had "repeatedly and dangerously" intercepted an RAF RC-135W Rivet Joint signals-intelligence aircraft on routine international-airspace patrol over the Black Sea in April 2026. The Su-27 conducted six passes in front of the Rivet Joint, on one occasion approaching to within six metres of the aircraft's nose. The proximity activated the Rivet Joint's emergency systems and disabled the autopilot. Per UK MoD, this was the most dangerous Russian intercept against an RAF Rivet Joint aircraft since the September 2022 incident in which a Russian Su-27 fired an unguided air-to-air missile in the vicinity of an RC-135W. Healey, in the 22 May statement, praised the "exceptional professionalism" of the RAF crew. Separately, on 21 May, NATO Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) confirmed on its public channels that the Portuguese Navy frigate NRP Dom Francisco de Almeida and a Royal Navy Merlin Mk2 helicopter operating from HMS Prince of Wales were shadowing the Russian Northern Fleet intelligence-collection vessel Yury Ivanov in the Norwegian Sea during NATO Exercise Dynamic Mongoose 2026; the MARCOM caption read "We. Are. Watching."

Signal › Three Russian Northern-flank pressure incidents now sit on the public record across the 21–25 May window — the GPS jamming of an RAF transport carrying the UK Defence Secretary, the April Rivet Joint intercept disclosed on 22 May, and the Yury Ivanov shadow operation during Dynamic Mongoose. Read together, they form a graduated pattern sitting alongside the kinetic escalation tracked in the lead above: the 21 May jamming hits at the political-personality level, the April Rivet Joint passes hit at the operational-airframe level, and the Yury Ivanov shadow sits at the exercise-area surveillance level. The pattern: all three target categories — minister transport, ISR airframe, surface exercise environment — have been part of the Russian Baltic and High North electronic-warfare and presence-signalling repertoire since at least 2024, with the Healey/Shapps comparison demonstrating the policy continuity across UK governments and Russian administrations. The open variables are doctrinal rather than tactical. Whether MARCOM's "We. Are. Watching." framing and Healey's "reckless Russian interference" attribution surface in the Lemesos Gymnich FAC discussion of escalation thresholds (Article 42.7 mapping, hybrid-attack threshold) is one test. Whether the GPS jamming pattern receives any framework-level NATO response at the 7–8 July Ankara Summit beyond existing maritime/air patrolling adjustments is the next.

Czech Security Information Service (BIS) Director Michal Koudelka, in remarks delivered on Monday 25 May at a security conference held in the Czech Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Czech parliament), assessed that Europe is not currently facing the threat of a massive Russian assault similar to the war in Ukraine, but warned of a distinct alternative scenario. Koudelka, per ČTK: "I do not think we are facing such a massive attack as Ukraine in the near future, but a Russian attempt to attack one of the member states of NATO, for example in the Baltic region, with the aim of testing the speed and severity of the alliance's response, is much more likely." Koudelka framed Russia as "by far the greatest threat" to European countries and called for unequivocal declaration of unity and determination to defend, characterising this as "the only way to deter the Russian aggressor from this very dangerous adventure". He separately described the weekend Oreshnik-anchored strike against Kyiv as "barbarian" and emphasised the hybrid-warfare dimension running alongside the kinetic track — attacks on Ukrainian refugees, the questioning of anti-Russian sanctions, and disinformation campaigns aimed at polarising European society and weakening trust in democratic institutions.

The Koudelka assessment is the most specific Baltic threat warning issued on the record by a serving European intelligence chief in the run-up to Ankara. It pairs in the same news cycle with Finnish public broadcaster Yle's 25 May reporting that GPS interference attributed to Russia is now being detected farther west — intermittently across the Archipelago Sea and around the Åland Islands — having previously been concentrated mainly in the Gulf of Finland. Per West Finland Coast Guard District deputy commander Pekka Niittyla, the interference is linked to Russian efforts to protect strategically important ports recently targeted by Ukrainian deep-strike operations — the Russian GPS-jamming envelope is now spilling westward into Finnish maritime space.

Signal › The Koudelka assessment converts the Northern Flank pressure pattern tracked in Signal 3 above — graduated GPS jamming, air-intercept passes, exercise-area surveillance — into an explicit intelligence-community warning about a Baltic test case. The signal strength lies not in the novelty of the scenario (Baltic "limited attack" war-gaming has been an analytical staple since 2014) but in the messenger and venue: a serving intelligence chief making the assessment on the record in a parliamentary setting, and doing so in the same week that the Oreshnik saturation strike (Signal 1) demonstrates Russian willingness to escalate kinetically while testing Western response thresholds. Two variables sit downstream. First, where allied intelligence chiefs land in the run-up to Ankara — degree of public echo, divergent emphasis, or silence as its own datapoint. Second, whether the warning surfaces in the Lemesos Gymnich discussion on escalation thresholds and Article 42.7 mapping — the BIS scenario of a "limited attack" designed to test alliance response maps directly onto the below-Article-5 hybrid-attack scenario being modelled in the 42.7 tabletop exercise tracked in Signal No. 65. The Niittyla/Yle finding on Åland-axis GPS interference further extends the geographic perimeter of the Russian electronic-warfare presence pattern beyond the Baltic states proper into Finnish western waters.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's proposal to establish a formal 0.25%-of-GDP annual floor for allied military aid to Ukraine — an initiative Rutte had hoped to secure ahead of the 7–8 July Ankara Summit — was blocked by five members: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and Canada. The five — described by an Alliance source as "not very enthusiastic about the idea" — include some of Ukraine's largest European military donors. At least seven NATO countries that already spend more than 0.25% of GDP on Ukraine support backed the proposal: the Netherlands, Poland, and the Baltic and Nordic states. Decisions in NATO are made by consensus; London, Paris, Madrid, Rome and Ottawa opposed the initiative, and Rutte on 25 May acknowledged that the proposal lacks sufficient backing to proceed. A UK Foreign Office spokesman told The Sunday Telegraph that London "continues to engage with NATO allies on all proposals to ensure the alliance can best support Ukraine." French, Italian, Spanish and Canadian representatives did not respond to Telegraph requests for comment. The broader context: in late April, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that the declining US share of military aid to Ukraine reflected the deliberate posture of the Trump administration.

Signal › The 0.25% block is the first public rejection of a specific, quantified NATO burden-sharing instrument for Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began, and it surfaces the structural fissure inside the alliance on the precise question of converting rhetorical commitment into binding instruments — a tension Großwald has tracked since the Helsingborg NAC (Signal No. 66). The substantive point is that the blockage cannot be read primarily as a question of political will — the UK and France are among the largest military donors to Ukraine — and that the dispute turns on institutional design: a mandatory GDP-linked formula is harder to accept than the underlying quantum of aid, for reasons that span sovereignty, fiscal flexibility, and domestic politics. The operative question for Ankara is what Rutte salvages from the proposal — a non-mandatory political pledge, a percentage-of-defence-spending target, a voluntary coalition framework, or nothing — and how visibly the gap between Summit ambition and alliance consensus is allowed to register in the communiqué. The blockage also sharpens the context for the Lemesos Gymnich FAC: with a NATO-wide quantitative target off the table for now, the EU's own Article 42.7 mapping and Defence Readiness Roadmap instruments gain relative weight.

On Friday 22 May at approximately 18:20 local time, the first three Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II aircraft delivered to the Polish Air Force — designated F-35A Husarz, tactical numbers 3509, 3510 and 3511 — landed at the 32nd Tactical Air Base at Łask in central Poland after transit from Lockheed Martin Fort Worth via Lajes Air Base (Azores), supported by a USAF KC-46A Pegasus tanker. The handover was attended by Deputy Prime Minister and National Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. Poland's 32-aircraft contract (USD 4.6 billion, signed 31 January 2020) provides for 14 aircraft on station at Łask by end-2026 and full delivery through 2030, with a second tactical squadron to follow at the 21st Tactical Air Base in Świdwin where infrastructure is under construction. The Husarz fleet will replace Soviet-era MiG-29 and Su-22 aircraft. The arrival makes Poland the first NATO Eastern Flank state to operate a fifth-generation combat aircraft, and lands on the same week as the Trump 5,000-troops-to-Poland Truth Social announcement and the Helsingborg NAC framing tracked in Signal No. 66.