New evidence from Oreshnik debris suggests Russia has restarted domestic production of missile components, complicating assumptions behind current sanctions.
"The Oreshnik is a breakthrough for Russia's defense industry, equipped with warhead materials capable of withstanding the temperature of the Sun," Russian President Vladimir Putin said of the missile system in February 2025, months after its first strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Russian state media has since promoted it as a weapon no air defense system can intercept.
So what is actually inside it?
The answer starts with a decade-old parts bin, but the latest evidence suggests Russia is no longer simply drawing down old stock. It is starting to build new parts for it.
Oreshnik as Exception
Ukrainian military experts recovered and examined instrument-compartment debris from two Oreshnik strikes: Dnipro in November 2024 and Lviv in January 2026.
We at the Ukrainian think tank Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO) then analyzed and cross-verified their component-level findings, cataloguing part numbers, manufacturer markings, and date codes recovered from the wreckage.
In every prior NAKO investigation into Russia's precision-guided weapons — from cruise missiles to drones — we found dozens of Western-made components or commercially available Chinese microchips.
The Oreshnik is an exception.
It contains virtually no advanced foreign electronics. Instead, its instrument compartment is packed with low- and medium-complexity semiconductors manufactured by Russian and Belarusian companies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Image: Huang Jingwen/AFPWhere the Oreshnik Comes From
The Oreshnik is not a new design. It is an evolutionary continuation of Soviet-era missile programs such as Topol-M, Yars, and Rubezh. It uses the same solid-fuel stages and mobile launch platforms.
The key difference is range: rather than intercontinental reach, the Oreshnik is optimized for intermediate-range missions (2,000 to 5,500 kilometers/1,243 to 3,418 miles), putting most of Europe within reach.
Key Findings
Military specialists examined 470 missile components, while NAKO verified the following:
- Most of the components were manufactured between 2014 and 2018.
- They were produced by at least 25 companies from Russia and Belarus.
- Sixty-two percent of the identified manufacturers are currently subject to at least one international sanctions regime; Ukraine has sanctioned 93 percent of these entities.
- No satellite navigation (GLONASS/GPS) or telemetry equipment was recovered from the fragments.
Multi-channel resistor networks manufactured by Kontakt, a Russian producer of fixed and variable resistors sanctioned by Ukraine, recovered from Oreshnik missile debris. Image: NAKOWho Builds the Oreshnik
Production spans much of Russia's territory, concentrated in the Moscow region and Zelenograd, which the Soviet Union once envisioned as a domestic answer to Silicon Valley.
A significant contribution also comes from the Belarusian state holding company Integral and its subsidiary Transistor.
Manufacturers identified in the Oreshnik’s circuit boards and microchips include both defense contractors and nominally civilian companies:
- Pilyugin Research and Production Center for Automation and Instrument Engineering (Moscow): principal developer of guidance systems for Roscosmos and Russia's nuclear triad, including Topol-M. Manufactured printed circuit boards for the Oreshnik's guidance system.
- NPO Fizika (Moscow): supplies military-grade Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor transceivers similar to those used in the Kh-101 cruise missile.
- Angstrem JSC and Mikron JSC (Zelenograd): Russia's leading semiconductor manufacturers, operating under Rostec. Their decade-old logic integrated circuits and transistors, primarily manufactured in 2014 and 2015, form the foundation of the Oreshnik's computing system.
- Kremniy EL (Bryansk): a major microelectronics manufacturer, with roughly 90 percent of output going to the defense sector. Produced the Zener diodes stabilizing the missile's electrical systems.
- MStator PJSC (Novgorod Region): manufactures magnetic components and pulse transformers also identified in the Iskander-K and Kh-101 missiles.
Assessment
First, the Oreshnik's architecture rests on manufacturing processes that have remained largely unchanged for decades. These are technologies of a previous generation, not the breakthrough Russian officials describe.
Second, debris from the 2024 Dnipro and early-2026 Lviv strikes showed components manufactured predominantly between 2014 and 2018, suggesting Oreshnik production has relied largely on accumulated stockpiles rather than newly manufactured microelectronics.
That picture has since shifted, and new evidence points to something more consequential than a missile built from spare parts: an active production line.
Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi obtained new information from Vladyslav Vlasiuk, the Ukrainian President's Commissioner for Sanctions Policy, on a separate Oreshnik used in the May 24, 2026 strike on Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region.
According to the analysis of the missile debris, more than half of the dated components were manufactured in 2023 and 2024, with some as recent as 2025. All, according to Vlasiuk, were produced exclusively by Russian and Belarusian enterprises.
This changes the shape of the finding. The Dnipro and Lviv debris suggested Russia was running down a legacy stockpile. The Bila Tserkva debris suggests that stockpile is now being replenished, that Russia has moved from depleting Soviet-era inventories to manufacturing a new generation of components for its ballistic missile program.
What has not changed is the underlying technology. Newly produced or not, none of the identified components represent a technological leap.
Both the old stock and the new production draw on the same Russian-Belarusian microelectronics ecosystem that has supplied the defense sector for decades — an ecosystem that is not innovating so much as it is scaling back up.
This also points to a broader trend: the line between civilian and military microelectronics production in Russia has effectively disappeared. Ballistic missile production now depends on the manufacturing capacity of dozens of enterprises formally classified as civilian but functionally embedded in the military-industrial complex.
Emergency services conduct rescue operations at the site of a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo: Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via AFPSanctions Policy
That has implications for sanctions policy.
A year ago, it was reasonable to assume Russia was primarily depleting existing component stockpiles.
The Bila Tserkva evidence undercuts that assumption. If Russia's microelectronics industry is now manufacturing new components for missile production, the stockpile is not a countdown clock. It is being refilled.
Sanctions focused narrowly on weapons manufacturers may therefore be missing the underlying supply chain: the broader semiconductor ecosystem in Russia and Belarus that feeds it.
Viktoriia Vyshnivska is a Senior Researcher at the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO), a leading Ukrainian anti-corruption think tank specializing in defense and security.
Her work focuses on sanctions policy, Russia's defense-industrial complex, export controls, and the supply chains that enable the Kremlin's war machine.
Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she has led and co-authored numerous investigations into the microelectronics and foreign components found in Russian missiles, drones, aircraft, and other weapons systems.
Her research has contributed to international sanctions discussions and has been presented to policymakers, governments, and expert audiences across Europe and Asia.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Defense Post.
The Defense Post aims to publish a wide range of high-quality opinion and analysis from a diverse array of people – do you want to send us yours? Click here to submit an op-ed.
