On 28 February 2025, in a tense Oval Office stand-off between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the United States (US) president stated: “You don't have the cards right now with us; you start having problems right now.” Trump was arguing that American military assistance was the primary leverage possessed by his Ukrainian counterpart.

In August 2025, the first photographs of the FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missile were leaked from a test launch at a secret facility in southern Ukraine. Fire Point, the constructor of the missile, deliberately went public with the launch to strengthen the hand of Zelenskyy and the perception of Ukraine.

It was just three years earlier, just after the Russian invasion in February 2022, that Fire Point’s three founders got together to ask each other what they might be doing to help resist the Russian invasion. Since then, the company has developed its models and production facilities at an unbelievably fast pace, one perhaps only possible in wartime while facing an existential crisis, and with a workforce as motivated and skilled as Ukrainians are.

Fire Point has become the largest manufacturer of deep-strike drones in Ukraine, those weapons capable of hitting key Russian infrastructure far beyond the battlefront. It has based its product on simple technology and production processes. It has more than 90 workshops scattered throughout Ukraine, and one for solid fuel in Denmark. Labyrinthian corridors of stacked wings, winglets, wooden stringers, tubular airframes, plastic and plywood, aluminium, and carbon fibre lead to workspaces featuring high-tech carbon winders and the tables for glueing, smoothing the wings, glueing the frames, wiring, and doing the final assembly.

That summarises Fire Point's credo: cheap, appropriate, and at scale.

Founders

Fire Point was established directly in response to the Russian invasion. The founding trio was led by Denys Shtilerman, an IT professional and chief designer, along with his longtime friend Yehor Skalyha, a film producer who took charge of military liaison, and an architect who became the technical director, Iryna Terekh.

Originally from Kharkiv and having studied architecture at Kyiv National University, Iryna takes up the story: “As a civilian, I never really thought about security as a governance issue. In my view, I thought naively that if there would be a threat, we would have an adult experienced to deal with this. But I reflected too little on this issue since the war started in 2014,” when she was just 23. “If I had reflected better on history, I could have understood the threat better.”

Fast forward to 2022. “With the Russian occupation as close as Irpin and Bucha, I realised that peace and security was an illusion, and I had to do something. I knew Denys. Together with Yehor, we started a volunteer civil society organisation, which had the objective of keeping Russia out of the United Nations. We also bought some drones from Ukraine and Europe, which cost us up to €350 000 each, stretching our resources.”

The company motto Quis Nisi Nos (“If not us then who?”) gives away its origins.

“My passion is production. In my previous life I worked in high-performance concrete technologies and urban furniture. Denys asked me what it would take to build a factory to produce 20 aircraft per month. I didn’t think it would be easy.” The experience proved otherwise.

“Denys, who has a PhD in physics, said that he would design the drone. I would turn it into a product. Yehor would do the testing. I had no connection with aviation, though Denys had built rockets as a hobby.” Born in 1974, Shtilerman had studied in Moscow, where he had come under scrutiny by the Federal Security Bureau, the Russian security agency, before returning to Ukraine.

“I thought it was a weakness that we were never in the industry before,” continues Iryna. “But I soon learnt that it was an advantage as I was filtering things through a production lens rather than through past prejudice. My focus was on production optimisation.”

The first drone was completed in May 2023, “an ugly thing, made out of plywood and fibreglass. We needed to go through a certification process, which included a battlefield operational test. Fortunately, we found a Ukrainian armed forces end-user willing to invest his mental health in us!”

For the final certification, Fire Point had to finalise seven aircraft and use them successfully at a real battlefield mission. “We had two and a half weeks to do so. We had 18 people working with us at the start, taking it in three-hour shifts, 24/7, sleeping on the factory floor on camping gear. And yet at the time we were thinking of a production of 20 aircraft per month, which seemed an impossible objective when we were covered in epoxy resin.”

Personally Funded

The $2 million initial development and testing programme was funded personally by Shtilerman.

“The test was successful, despite the hostile presence of Russian drones. It made us think, however, about the security of the end-user, those launching the aircraft. An airfield was vulnerable, particularly close to the frontline. The idea to launch drones with chassis from the large visible airfield started to look extremely dangerous at practice. We were coming back home with the understanding that we needed to change the approach. We considered catapult as one of the options, but it was heavy and needed 20 minutes to recharge with compressed air. We needed to come up with a better solution.”

The team settled on a rocket booster for an assisted take-off, which would be discarded shortly after take-off. “We ordered various such boosters from all over the world. We then made our own version.” This had to confront a red line imposed by Denys at the outset: not to produce explosives or anything flammable at Fire Point.

“We experimented with solid rocket fuel mixtures. The first batches were mixed in a pizza dough maker. But we learnt from YouTube videos, old Soviet books, engaged great chemical engineers and enthusiasts, and also from my experience with concrete – it proved not to be rocket science,” she smiles.

“The booster gave us an advantage with range and predictability, and allowed the aircraft to be launched in a discreet way.”

With a successful certification process in late 2023, Fire Point received an order for 50 aircraft, which was increased to 150 before the end of the year. “There were virtually very few other possibilities on the market, and the Ukrainian government was willing to spend money on projects that could deliver quickly.”

And so was born the FP-1, a “deep-strike” propeller-driven, one-way attack drone capable of reaching targets 3 400km away, depending on the fuel load, which ranges from 20 to 80 litres, and carrying up to a 60kg warhead. The guide that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” is evident in the use of a twin-cylinder, air-cooled, twin-stroke engine, giving the aircraft a 20-hour maximum flight time.

Not all of the tech is simple. Fire Point, for example, manufactures its own ballistic missile flight controller, navigation units, advanced software solutions for electronic warfare (EW) resistance, missile actuators, visual navigation, and CNC machines. One quarter of the workforce is in R&D.

The FP-1 was certified for service in May 2023 and carried out its first combat mission that September. “At the start of 2024, we competed in an open competition for deep-strike missions based on one simple test: fly under EW conditions, hit the targets, and explode. Just five companies took part, and we won the competition, fulfilling all three checks.”

By 2026 it was responsible for more than half of Ukrainian deep-strike operations in Russia, targeting ammunition depots, oil refineries, and logistics and command centres, the FP-1 costing as little as $55 000 each.

Based on the FP-1 design concept, the FP-2 was developed as a mid-range (up to 500km) alternative with a larger (up to 200kg) warhead. The introduction of this model significantly increased the company’s output. In 2024, Fire Point produced 3 000 drones. In 2026, the workforce of 7 000 is expected to ramp up to deliver more than 100 000 drones and missiles.

Leader

Fire Point has been a leader in a sector that has kickstarted Ukraine’s industrial ingenuity after decades of post-Soviet dormancy. The approach taken by companies such as Fire Point has been shaped by a shortage of human and financial capital, and the historical loss of technologies since independence, including emigration of skilled professionals. And yet the scale and stakes of the war have driven the search for cheap, mass-produced weapons.

Ukraine did not inherit the industrial conditions under which Western weapons are normally conceived. It lacked the time, capital, and institutional depth to separate research, procurement, and production into orderly stages. Design had to begin with what could actually be built: the machines available, the components that could still be sourced, the people who could be trained quickly, and the losses the state could afford to absorb. This imposed a severe honesty on engineering. Every unnecessary dependency became a strategic liability. What emerged was an industrial system organised around revision rather than perfection. The battlefield entered the production process itself. Operators exposed weaknesses, engineers altered the design, factories changed the build, and the next version returned to the front. The advantage lay in the compression of this loop. In such a war, a weapon’s value rests partly in how rapidly it can become a different weapon.

Friends joined friends in the business, some staff straight out of university, others coming from those sectors suffering from the full-scale war. Around 10% of manufacturing is outsourced. Some original Soviet-trained engineers are working with the company, the oldest not less than 94 years young, proving useful in ruling out production blind-alleys.

Ukraine’s need for longer-range, heavy-strike systems was both a consequence of its deal with the Russian and Western governments, by which it handed over or dismantled its missile capabilities as well as its strategic bomber force during the 1990s, and the fear of its Western partners of the political and potentially nuclear consequences of deep strikes into Russia. This left Ukraine with a strategic requirement that its allies were unwilling fully to satisfy. The gap between what the battlefield demanded and what diplomacy permitted became an industrial opportunity. Long-range strike could no longer remain only a question of foreign supply; it had to become a sovereign capability.

That distinction is fundamental. Dependence on allied weapons gives a state access to advanced technology, while also exposing it to restrictions on range, targets, volume, and timing. Domestic production restores a measure of political freedom. It allows military necessity to shape the weapon, rather than forcing strategy to remain within the limits of another government’s risk tolerance.

Each month Russia produces up to 70 air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles, 25 sea-launched Kalibrs, according to Ukrainian estimates, plus a further 60 Iskander M ballistic missiles. Russia has also repurposed S300 surface-to-air missiles in a surface-to-surface role. Deep-strike drones are Ukraine's asymmetric response to such Russian missile attacks. Sustained daily strikes are enough to create political pressure on President Vladimir Putin, especially by hitting consumer products and supply chains, and forcing a diversion of resources for their protection.

“Every day,” says Iryna with Ukrainian frankness, “we discover new bullshit fed by others. We started, for instance, to realise that if we did not make an advance with long-range weapons, no one else would. When I learned that we had to wait for a two-week approval on HIMARS launchers, it felt like someone having to watch their wife being raped and not being able to do anything. We had to do something. The HIMARS episode translated into a general realisation that security without independence does not mean anything.”

The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is a US-supplied system capable of firing a standard pod of six rockets or one Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, with a range of up to 300km. 

Technological Dependence

This formulation captures the political meaning of technological dependence. A state may legally own a weapon while lacking sovereign control over its use. Software permissions, external approval, proprietary maintenance, and inaccessible architecture can turn ownership into a conditional license.

Alliances inevitably impose constraints. A partner providing advanced systems has legitimate concerns about escalation, technology transfer, and the political consequences of how those systems are employed. The problem begins when dependence becomes so complete that the recipient cannot distinguish alliance coordination from strategic tutelage.

The “kill-switch” is therefore both a technical mechanism and a metaphor. It symbolically represents the moment when a state discovers that another actor possesses the ability to suspend what appeared to be its own power. Technological sovereignty means retaining sufficient knowledge, access, and freedom of modification to prevent an ally, vendor, or adversary from acquiring a veto over essential national action. Europe spent decades believing that interdependence had made such sovereignty obsolete. Ukraine discovered that interdependence is safe only when the right to refuse remains credible.

“You can’t have weapons where someone else possesses a kill-switch, like the Qataris have learnt with the Patriot. If we want safety and security, we need to encrypt our systems in an open architecture without kill-switches, avoiding a vendor lock-in. This is the reason we have embarked on this project. You would not start on a long car journey without checking your tyres and your oil, or whether your kids had the medicines they might need. So why don’t we question the quality of government spending on security, especially since this is an area of activity where some in the industry are very shady? It is the right way to do such things.”

The answer to the missile deep-strike challenge was the FP-5 Flamingo. “We started out with both ballistic and cruise missile options. Cruise offered a faster result, since it is basically like a fast, heavy drone. The Flamingo, which gained its moniker from its distinctive pink paintwork during trials, a nickname that stuck, took nine months to develop and build; the company’s ballistic missile programme has taken two years from its start to the first successful launches.”

Fire Point’s Flamingo is once again a mixture of pragmatism mixed in with advanced but off-the-shelf technology: it is inertially- and GPS-guided, weighing in at 6 000kg with a maximum range of 3 000km. Drawing on the original design of the Soviet Tupolev Tu-141 Strizh (“Swift”) drone, the Flamingo’s warhead was designed to be large, at 1 150kg compared to the 450kg of the US Tomahawk or the Russian Kalibr.

More intriguingly, Fire Point initially opted to use second-hand Soviet AI-25TL engines sourced from an Albatross L-39 jet trainer, available in their thousands on the global market. “We understood that there would, one way or the other, be a shortage of engines. So, we chose to visit the engine cemetery and use up engines that would only have to make a short, probably three-hour flight, but which because of their age, could not be certified on a civilian aircraft.”

Like the FP-1, initial take-off is assisted with an indigenous booster pack. Its airframe is constructed using radar-transparent carbon winding, a technique typically reserved for ballistic missiles. The Flamingo concept mirrors the FP-1 philosophy: a low-cost weapon designed for mass production, costing around $600 000, about a fifth of the cost of the Tomahawk. Production is just three units per day, which will rise to seven once a new engine is developed.

The FP-7, a tactical ballistic missile with an operational range of up to 250km carrying a warhead up to 200kg, was successfully tested in February 2026. Launched on an inclined slope, while based on a Soviet-era missile, it is made of carbon fibre with modern electronics, and is said to be around half the cost of an American ATACMS, or between $500 000 to $1 million, depending on specifications.

The FP-7.x version is an anti-ballistic missile to substitute for the Patriot. Developed as part of the European Freya anti-ballistic missile programme, the FP-7.x has open architecture, meaning it can be used with other radar systems. Plans include the FP-9 short-range ballistic missile capable of striking targets up to 850km away, with an 800kg warhead.

Fire Point has announced that the FP-1 will be open to scaled-up production by other companies and, in Iryna's words, become a “people's drone”. The idea is that other manufacturers could also produce it for frontline use, not unlike the model adopted by the US and United Kingdom in the Second World War.

Putin’s Choice

Fire Point is among more than 500 companies producing drones and missiles. As Ukraine’s drones degrade Russia’s infrastructure, its military and its economy, the biggest choice is still Vladimir Putin’s. Will he cherish the state over his ambition; or his ambitions over the state?

Although he started the war as a means of reasserting Russia’s global status, now Putin is battling to preserve Moscow’s status as a regional power. This power will continue to rapidly erode as Ukraine destroys Russia’s economy. Since the full-scale war, Russia has lost five years of growth and technological advancement. While the world has been leaping ahead in artificial intelligence and other areas, Putin has remained wedded to static geopolitical concepts connecting geography with power, wealth, and status.

And yet Putin’s biggest challenge is he himself represents a system. He cannot be succeeded. He cannot retire. He cannot be replaced. His best outcome was for him to enter history as a conqueror, like Tsar Nicholas I, the personification of autocracy. He has created the conditions that he looks increasingly like Nicholas II. And that did not end well.

“Our experience should make the West reconsider its doctrines in trying to run the battlefield. If they start after the war, it will cost them a lot. And if they do this now, they will ensure deterrence,” says Major Viktor Andrusiv, a Ukrainian special forces veteran. “Do not follow the technology,” he suggests, “follow the tasks we are solving on the battlefield. We developed counter-drones because of the Shaheds. We will use AI drones to solve mobilisation. When you follow the tech, you will always be outdated. Follow the tasks.”

In a matter of 24 months, Fire Point moved quickly from producing hundreds of units to tens of thousands. The main driver of Fire Point's growth has been a combination of demand and a response shaped by appropriate technology, pragmatism, government seed money, and bright minds. In car terms, it is said that the FP-1 is like a pyrizhok (“little pie”) – the Soviet ZAZ Tavria three-door hatchback – meaning simple, reliable, and mass produced. Appropriately, the Tavria (resembling the ancient Greek name for Crimea) was also known as capsulasmerti or “capsule of death”.

Like the Kalashnikov rifle, the aim is not to create a masterpiece, but something that will get the job done, cheaply. In this way, the AK-47 became ubiquitous just as Fire Point has come to define Ukraine’s deep-strike arsenal.

Dr Mills is with the Platform for African Democrats, and is in Ukraine to research a new book.