For all the attacks that Ukraine has been forced to withstand, it has also found ways to strike back. Ukraine’s deep-strike drones wreak havoc almost daily on Russia, sometimes a thousand miles behind the front lines, pummeling Russian energy infrastructure, military depots, and airfields.
But while these drones can be disruptive, they are also often thwarted by Russia’s smartest defenses. Missiles provided by the United States or Europe are more effective at breaking through, but Ukraine has never had as many as it needs.
Germany, for instance, has long declined to deliver its best air-launched cruise missile: the Taurus KEPD-350, a German-Swedish product. And Ukraine’s shortages are now even more acute amid the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran: U.S. Extended Range Attack Munitions—essentially a hybrid between a cruise missile and a bomb—are no longer arriving in Ukraine, to say nothing of the U.S. Tomahawks that the Trump administration initially promised and then refused to send.
The Ukrainians have responded by becoming even more enterprising, setting out to make their own equally capable missiles. Those fruits are now being harvested.
The Ukrainian method for expedited missile production has involved learning from the internet, relying on simple technology, and truncating production processes.
“We found the technology on YouTube,” technical director Iryna Terekh of Fire Point, a Kyiv-based defense manufacturing firm, told Ukrainian media. “Not entirely, of course—we had to run experiments, and we have in-house chemists. The formula itself [for rocket propellent] is widely known: ammonium perchlorate, butadiene rubber, spherical aluminium and several other components. It’s not much more complicated than mixing concrete.”
Late last year, Ukraine started launching its own ballistic missiles, most notably one known as the Sapsan, and testing jet-powered cruise missiles called Flamingos. The latter—a private-sector product, unlike the Sapsans—hits targets as far away as 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) while carrying payloads of up to 1,150 kilograms (2,535 pounds). Their jamming-resistant satellite navigation technology enables Flamingos to better evade Russia’s latest defense systems.
In February, Ukraine showed off the new muscle by unleashing a Flamingo on the Votkinsk military production complex, a missile-producing facility more than 1,000 km (621 miles) beyond Moscow, and causing significant damage. Since then, Fire Point commenced serial production, though at the moment, just one emerges from the workshops each day.
“Until now, Russia has exploited the tyranny of distance to protect its defense industry,” George Barros of the U.S. Institute for the Study of War told Foreign Policy. “U.S. and European missiles can degrade Russian supplies, but they are finite. And Ukrainian drones can’t carry the payloads necessary to inflict serious damage on underground armament production and other targets.”
This new weaponry—and further long-range military technology in the works—may not immediately change the dynamics of Ukraine’s war. But a domestic arsenal that can deliver heavy strikes anywhere in Russia helps level the playing field. Just as crucial—because Ukraine, and not the United States, owns and fires these missiles—Kyiv alone determines the targets.
“These kinds of developments are consequential,” Barros said, “because this war is not static or stalemated. It’s dynamic. Either side could make a breakthrough.”
The illustrious, as well as contested, missile maker Fire Point—a 2022 start-up brought to life by a film producer, IT developer, and architect—is behind many of these technology leaps. The company went from producing a few hundred drone units in 2023 to tens of thousands in 2024, and its FP-1 is now the country’s main long-range strike drone. A company that started with 12 staff members, it employs around 3,700 today at a top-secret location. Its success owes much to the “Danish model” of financing, which enables foreign partners to invest directly in Ukrainian defense firms.
And Fire Point has more in the wings: the FP-7 and FP-9, short- and long-range ballistic missiles respectively, will boast yet higher speeds and more precise strike capabilities. Fire Point claims that, by the end of the summer, they will reach Moscow.
“A sticking point for all of Ukraine’s deep-strike weaponry,” according to the Kyiv Independent, “has been that Russia has effectively ringed Moscow and St. Petersburg with air defense systems. Drones and even cruise missiles almost never get through.”
But the F-9 is supposed to foil those defense fields. “Ours will hit at over 1,200 [meters per second],” Denys Shtilerman, the principle owner of Fire Point, told the Ukrainian Army TV, comparing its speed to Russia’s Iskander, which travels at about 800 meters per second. “Yes, something will get in the way, but 25 percent or something like that will get through and hit the target.”
Typical of Ukrainian arms manufacturers, Fire Point’s products—which also include missile defense systems, optical navigation modules, machine tools, engines, antennas that protect navigational systems from electronic warfare, and rocket fuel and boosters, too—come relatively cheap and are easy to produce and scale up. The Flamingo took just nine months to develop, and by October, Fire Point says, it hopes to churn out seven a day. Fire Point is designing its own engine for the Flamingo, which currently is an assemblage of refurbished Soviet weaponry.
Will it alter the larger battlefield picture? Maybe. “As Ukraine ramps up production of the Flamingo,” reports Forbes magazine, “it can integrate the missile with long-range drones as part of large-scale, coordinated strike packages. This approach, used by Russia and more recently Iran, is designed to stress air defense networks by presenting simultaneous threats with different speeds, altitudes, radar cross sections, and flight profiles.”
Ukraine’s own defense industry is cautiously optimistic. “The progress is real, particularly on long-range strike systems,” Ihor Fedirko of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry, a defense sector association, wrote in an email to Foreign Policy, “but ballistic programs don’t come cheap or fast. They need serious money, serious testing, time, and an industrial base that can sustain them,” he argued.
For the Flamingo, “the underlying logic is clear: lower unit cost, simpler production, and a serious ambition to scale,” Fedirko continued. “I wouldn’t frame this as DIY technology replacing top-tier Western missiles. That would be the wrong read. Western systems are in a different league when it comes to maturity, certification, systems integration, and depth of testing.” Fedirko noted that Flamingo production runs at less than $1 million dollars apiece, while a rough equivalent—the U.S. JASSM, an early Lockheed Martin cruise missile—costs $1.6 million to $1.9 million.
Barros, of the Institute for the Study of War, believes that it’s too early—and most of these missiles too untested—to evaluate their true capabilities, especially in the light of the fact that Ukrainian military technology advances very quickly on the battlefield. He acknowledged that Ukrainian missiles are considerably cheaper and, when scaled, can come off assembly lines much faster than European and U.S. models. But he said that he can’t yet speak definitively on their speeds, accuracy, and strike power.
Fire Point is the precocious child of Ukraine’s arms industry, though it is not without problems or controversy.
“Fire Point was long one of Ukraine’s most secretive large private defense companies. Yet in just a few months, it has become highly visible,” reported the media outlet Ukrainska Pravda in January, referring to an energy corruption scandal that did not involve Fire Point directly.
Military sources say that Fire Point has won the largest share of the Ukrainian state’s orders for deep-strike assets, in a very crowded field. “But who made the decision to direct most of the funding its way?” asked Ukrainska Pravda, which estimates the contracts’ value at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fire Point’s reputation has aroused suspicion for years. It begins with co-founder Shtilerman, whose ownership of the company was hidden from the public: He claimed that his dual nationality as a Russian citizen might pose a threat to the company, raising the possibility that his true allegiance was not with Ukraine.
The company also suffers from its association with Timur Mindich, a Ukrainian Israeli entrepreneur who fled the country late last year after being implicated in a major corruption scandal involving Ukraine’s energy system and happens to be an old friend and business partner of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Shtilerman has admitted that Mindich at one point sought a stake in the company, but nothing came of it. Moreover, another figure involved in the energy scandal, Ihor Fursenko, was formally employed at Fire Point. Fursenko was part of the group, led by Minich, that is alleged to have received kickbacks from energy construction and procurement, including building defenses for Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and then laundered the proceeds.
Fire Point has grown quickly and, like other major contractors, has benefited from state support and assistance. But beyond speculation and conjecture, Ukrainska Pravda reports, no specific corruption allegations have stuck to the company.
For now, Ukraine’s pursuit of missile technology sounds impressive—and it is. But Kyiv has a long way to go before it punches at Russia’s weight.
“We need to stay grounded,” Fedirko said. “Ballistic capability is among the hardest and most expensive to build. It takes money, time, testing, engineering continuity.”
In February alone, Russia launched 288 ballistic and cruise missiles into Ukraine, reflecting the former’s burgeoned production capacity. Ukraine’s long-range missile production will ramp up over 2026. But even if the Ukrainians manage to hit their target of a handful of missiles per day by summer, they won’t outgun Russia anytime soon.
