A US intelligence assessment has concluded that Russia may use its lethal new intermediate-range ballistic missile against Ukraine again in the “coming days”, a US official said.

The experimental Oreshnik missile is seen by America more as an attempt at intimidation than a game-changer on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a US official.

They added Russia has only a handful of the missiles and that they carry a smaller warhead than other weaponry that Russia has regularly launched at Ukraine.

Russia first fired the the weapon in a November 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 Mr 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 US President Joe Biden agreed to loosened restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American made longer-range weapons to strike deeper into Russian territory.

Mr Putin said at the time: “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.”

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 310 and 3,400 miles. Such weapons were banned under a Soviet-era treaty that Washington and Moscow abandoned in 2019.

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

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