The president has warned France is “within range” of Russia’s hypersonic ballistic missile
President Emmanuel Macron has vowed that France, alongside its European partners, will accelerate the development of new long-range weapons, pointing to Russia’s Oreshnik as a technological achievement capable of shifting the balance of power in the short term.
The Russian military used its cutting-edge Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile system last week to strike a Ukrainian aviation plant in Lviv, which was servicing F-16s and MiG-29s near the Polish border.
“We are within range of these shots,” Macron warned soldiers in a speech at the Istres-Le Tubé Air Base on Thursday. He noted that France seeks to obtain similar weapons through the so-called European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA) initiative.
“The initiative that we launched, known as ELSA, makes perfect sense when we have just observed for the second time the firing of a very long-range missile, known as Oreshnik,” Macron told the audience. “If we want to remain credible, we Europeans – and especially France, which has certain technologies – must acquire these new weapons that will change the situation in the short term.”
“With our German and British partners in particular, we must make strong progress on these long-range strike capabilities… to increase our credibility and support our nuclear deterrence,” he added.
Launched in 2024 by France, Germany, and Poland (and later joined by Sweden, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands), the ELSA program seeks to leverage shared European costs and industrial strength to develop long-range conventional strike capabilities, though it has yet to produce specific plans.
Russia first fired the Oreshnik at a weapons plant in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in November 2024, describing it as a successful “combat test.” Mass production has since begun, and Russia deployed the system in its close ally Belarus in late 2025.
President Vladimir Putin has claimed the Oreshnik has no equal globally, comparing its power to a “falling meteor.” According to him, the system carries dozens of homing warheads capable of hitting multiple targets while traveling at ten times the speed of sound.
The second Oreshnik strike was conducted as part of Russia’s response to an attempted “terrorist attack by the Kiev regime” on a presidential residence in the Novgorod region, according to the Defense Ministry. CCTV footage from Lviv captured numerous projectiles descending from the sky in rapid succession, but Kiev yet to confirm the scope of the damage.
