Russia shells Ukraine with Kh-55 air-launched cruise missiles, which the official Kyiv handed over to Moscow for gas debts.

This became known in the course of the investigation by the Schemes publication project of Radio Svoboda.

The journalists obtained the text of an agreement and a list of numbers of the transferred missiles.

The cruise missiles were transferred to Ukraine under the agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers and the Russian government in 1999 in exchange for repayment of debts for Russian gas.

The Schemes compared the numbers of those missiles with the Kh-55s that the Russian army began to use against Ukraine during the full-scale invasion after 24 February 2023.

The journalists discovered at least a dozen missiles of those fired by Russia at Ukraine to be on the list in the 1990s. Some of them were shot down by Ukrainian air defence forces, while some hit residential buildings.

Three such Russian missiles, shot down by Ukrainian air defence in January, May and April 2023 in Kyiv and the region, are among those transferred to Moscow in 1999.

Another Kh-55, which at the end of 2022 hit an apartment building in the Ukrainian capital and killed a woman, was also handed over by Kyiv as part of the agreement. Another missile, which Ukraine also handed over to Russia, hit a house in the Kyiv region, injuring a child.

The Schemes identified several more missiles with the help of photos with numbers on the wreckage obtained from law enforcement sources.

In total, the journalists managed to identify over ten air-launched cruise missiles that Ukraine had previously transferred to Russia and that the aggressor country had already used.

The journalists searched the archives for an agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, headed by Valerii Pustovoitenko, and the Russian government, led by Vladimir Putin, signed in Yalta in 1999. According to the agreement, Kyiv handed over eight Tu-160 and three Tu-95MS bombers, as well as 575 Kh-55 cruise missiles to Moscow. In return, Russia compensated Ukraine for its debt for Russian gas in the amount of 275 million hryvnias. This is the determined value of the transferred equipment.

As previously reported, in the fall of last year, the Russians began to use Soviet air-launched cruise missiles designed to carry a nuclear warhead against Ukraine. However, in this case, the missiles had no warhead, but only a mass-size simulator. Such missiles are primarily designed to detect positions and exhaust Ukrainian air defense. But due to their kinetic energy and fuel residues, they still pose a threat.