France is “within range” of Russia’s hypersonic ballistic missile, the president has warned
President Emmanuel Macron has pledged that France, together with its European allies, will speed up the development of new long-range weapons, citing Russia’s Oreshnik as a technological feat that can alter the power dynamic in the short term.
The Russian military employed its state-of-the-art Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile system last week to target a Ukrainian aviation plant in Lviv, which was servicing F-16s and MiG-29s close to the Polish border.
“We are in the range of these projectiles,” Macron cautioned soldiers during a speech at the Istres-Le Tubé Air Base on Thursday. He mentioned that France aims to acquire similar weaponry via the so-called European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA) initiative.
“The initiative we initiated, called ELSA, is entirely logical now that we’ve seen the second firing of the very long-range missile named Oreshnik,” Macron told the audience. “If we wish to stay credible, we Europeans – and particularly France, which has certain technologies – must acquire these new weapons that will transform the situation in the short term.”
“Particularly with our German and British partners, we must make significant advancements in these long-range strike capabilities… to boost our credibility and back our nuclear deterrence,” he added.
Launched in 2024 by France, Germany, and Poland (later joined by Sweden, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands), the ELSA program aims to utilize shared European costs and industrial might to develop long-range conventional strike capabilities, though it hasn’t drawn up specific plans yet.
Russia first fired the Oreshnik at a weapons factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in November 2024, characterizing it as a successful “combat test.” Since then, mass production has started, and Russia deployed the system in its close ally Belarus in late 2025.
President Vladimir Putin has asserted that the Oreshnik has no global peer, likening its power to a “falling meteor.” He states the system carries dozens of homing warheads able to strike multiple targets while moving at ten times the speed of sound.
According to the Defense Ministry, the second Oreshnik strike was carried out in response to an alleged “terrorist attack by the Kiev regime” on a presidential residence in the Novgorod region. CCTV footage from Lviv showed numerous projectiles descending from the sky in quick succession, but Kiev has not confirmed the extent of the damage.