The missile Moscow used to frighten all of Europe may be closer to its end than it wants to admit. According to the Institute for the Study of War, citing Ukrainian intelligence analysis, Russia has used up its stock of the medium-range ballistic missile "Oreshnik" and may have only one operational unit left.

The chronology is telling. After the first use against Dnipro in November 2024, Putin ordered the accelerated production of four more missiles. Three of them were fired during 2026 - one in the Luhansk region, two in the Kyiv region - while one launch reportedly failed in May in the Donetsk region. When three of four new missiles are already spent, the "wonder weapon" starts to look like a limited resource.

There's an interesting detail too. According to documents the Ukrainian analysis reportedly obtained, Russian military plants bypassed quality-control protocols to meet the deadlines set by the Kremlin. The result: a defect in a Soviet-era gyroscope in the navigation system, which could cause a deviation from the target of "several dozen kilometers." A weapon that misses by tens of kilometers isn't a precision strike - it's a lottery with terrible consequences.

The Institute had previously assessed that the threats with the "Oreshnik" function partly as psychological pressure, with Putin describing the strikes themselves as "tests." And here is the lesson the Balkans know well: the loudest weapon is often precisely the one not even the man holding it trusts. When a power starts to march on fear instead of results, that's usually a sign of weakness packaged as might.