WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. intelligence assessment has concluded that Russia may use its lethal new intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine again in “coming days,” a U.S. official said Wednesday.

The experimental Oreshnik missile is seen by U.S. officials more as an attempt at intimidation than a game-changer on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive information.

The official said Russia has only a handful of the missiles and that they carry a smaller warhead than other missiles that Russia has regularly launched at Ukraine.

Russia first fired the the weapon in a Nov. 21 missile attack against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Surveillance camera video of the strike showed huge fireballs piercing the darkness and slammed into the ground at astonishing speed.

Within hours of the attack on the military facility, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the rare step of speaking on national TV to boast about the new, hypersonic missile. He warned the West that its next use could be against Ukraine’s NATO allies who allowed Kyiv to use their longer-range missiles to strike inside Russia.

The attack came two days after Putin signed a revised version of Russia’s nuclear doctrine that lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons. The doctrine allows for a potential nuclear response by Moscow even to a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power.

That strike also came soon after President Joe Biden agreed to loosened restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American made longer-range weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory.

“We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against military facilities of the countries that allow to use their weapons against our facilities,” Putin said at the time.

The Pentagon said the Oreshnik was an experimental type of intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM, based on Russia’s RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. The attack marked the first time such a weapon was used in a war.

Intermediate-range missiles can fly between 500 to 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,400 miles). Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is pushing Putin to act to reach an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine, describing it as part of his active efforts as president-elect to end the war.

“Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump wrote on social media last weekend, referring to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

EXPLAINER

Online self-publishing platform Substack has removed a post purportedly by Luigi Mangione, chief suspect in the murder of CEO Brian Thompson.

Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged with murder in UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s December 4 shooting death, left a handwritten document explaining his motivation, New York City police officials said.

Police had not released the document to the public as of December 10. But some X users were sharing what they said was a manifesto Mangione published on Substack, a subscription-based platform for online content creators.

“This is allegedly Luigi’s manifesto,” a December 9 X post with more than five million views said. The post shared four screenshots of text from a Substack post with the headline “The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences” and the subhead “Luigi Mangione’s last words”.

The Substack article was dated December 9, the day Mangione was arrested at an Altoona, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s. “The second amendment means I am my own chief executive and commander in chief of my own military,” it said. “I authorise my own act of self-defence in response to a hostile entity making war on me and my family.”

We found other social media posts sharing the same images or language as the blog post and saying Mangione had written them.

But he did not write them. Substack removed the post “for violating Substack’s Content Guidelines, which prohibit impersonation”, a company spokesperson told PolitiFact in an emailed statement.

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said on December 9 that police had found a handwritten document when they arrested Mangione “that speaks to both his motivation and mindset”. As of December 10, authorities had not offered more information about its contents.

The New York Times reported on the three-page document, citing an internal police report it obtained. Mangione described the act as a “symbolic takedown” of the healthcare industry, citing “alleged corruption and ‘power games’”.

None of that language appeared in the Substack post being shared online as Mangione’s manifesto.

PolitiFact reviewed reports about the document by The New York Times, CNN, New York Post or ABC News, all outlets that said they had reviewed the message or had it described to them by law enforcement sources. None of the reports included mention of the Second Amendment. PolitiFact has not obtained a copy.

We rate claims that Mangione wrote the Substack article as False.