Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Sunday, Reuters reported, that Russia had deployed hypersonic Kinzhal missiles three times during what Moscow called a “special military operation” in Ukraine.

The Kinzhal missiles are part of a series of new hypersonic weapons that President Vladimir Putin unveiled in 2018 in a belligerent speech in which he said they could hit almost anywhere in the world and bypass the US-built anti-missile shield.

Serhiy Shoigu said on state television that the missiles had proven effective in hitting high-value targets in all three cases, saying they were unmatched and nearly impossible to shoot down in flight.

“We deployed it three times during a military special operation,” Shoigu said in an interview broadcast by “Russia 1”. “And three times it showed exceptional characteristics.”

The Russian Navy will receive Zircon hypersonic missiles.

Russia used the Kinzhal system for the first time in Ukraine about a month after sending tens of thousands of troops into its neighbor’s territory, striking a large weapons depot in the Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine.

Russia’s defense ministry said this week that three MiG-31E fighter jets, equipped with Kinzhal missiles, had been redeployed to the Kaliningrad region, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea coast between NATO and EU members Poland and Lithuania.

On the occasion of Russia’s Navy Day late last month, Putin announced that the navy would receive what he described as “formidable” hypersonic Zircon cruise missiles in the coming months.

Missiles can fly at a speed nine times the speed of sound, bypassing anti-aircraft defenses.

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