Ukraine wants homegrown missiles capable of striking deep inside Russia, including Moscow, but its existing ‘Flamingos’ show how hard mass production can be

On September 11, Fire Point, Ukraine’s leading manufacturer of long-range strike weapons, said it was ready to supply the military with the FP-7 short-range ballistic missile. The FP-7 is intended to replace — or supplement — the well-known ATACMS. Fire Point is also continuing to test the medium-range FP-9, a type of missile Ukraine does not currently possess. The company says that “with adequate funding,” it will be able to produce up to three FP-9s a day within the next few months. If it delivers on that promise, Ukraine could substantially expand its ability to strike deep inside Russia and put new targets within reach that it currently lacks the weapons to hit. However, not all of Fire Point’s projects have gone according to plan. Suspected corruption is not the only issue: The company has also faced practical difficulties organizing production, particularly securing engines. Nor is it clear how the new ballistic missiles will perform in combat against Russian air defenses. Here, we examine the prospects and problems facing Ukraine’s missile program.

Why does Ukraine need missiles at all? Can’t drones strike Russia?

Compared with missiles, UAVs have obvious advantages — they are inexpensive and can be produced in enormous quantities — but they also have drawbacks.

• Low speed: This makes drones vulnerable to air defenses, including mobile units armed with nothing more than machine guns. The standard way to overcome these defenses is to launch drones en masse, overwhelming the enemy’s air defenses so that some reach their targets. But this partly negates their cost advantage: Many UAVs must be expended against a target that requires only one hit. Once losses are factored in, destroying a target may not be cheap at all. Meanwhile, both Ukraine and Russia face financial problems as the cost of the war rises. Ukraine has a $27 billion hole in its military budget that only its Western partners can fill. Russia’s military spending reached 10% of GDP in the first half of the year, causing its budget deficit to soar. A significant share of this spending is tied specifically to expanding drone production and making costly modifications to drones.
• Low speed and a small payload: Unlike cruise and ballistic missiles, drones carry relatively modest warheads weighing less than 100 kilograms, while missile warheads weigh hundreds of kilograms and can reach a metric ton. Because they strike at speeds of less than 200 kilometers per hour, drones cannot penetrate any reasonably sturdy barrier. Missiles have far greater penetrating power because their kinetic energy increases with the square of their speed. As Russian and Ukrainian strikes have shown, drones therefore cannot be used effectively against reinforced-concrete structures such as industrial buildings. This has forced Ukraine to focus its attacks on “soft” targets such as oil-refinery equipment and retailers’ warehouses. Attempts to disable military factories with drones have had little success, though there have been exceptions. Several large-scale attacks on a Geran-type UAV production facility in Tatarstan, for example, neither shut it down for long nor prevented its expansion. Russia’s strikes show that missiles are much better suited to such tasks, though Ukraine has sometimes restored some power generation at plants even after large-scale missile attacks.
• Low-cost countermeasures: Air-defense systems designed to counter drones can be produced quickly and at relatively low cost. It is hard to imagine anti-drone defenses running out of ammunition entirely. By contrast, missiles — especially ballistic missiles — require sophisticated, high-speed interceptors, which are often in critically short supply.

Ukraine therefore needs large numbers of missiles with different capabilities to hit military targets in Russia, including production facilities and newly built aircraft hangars at airfields.

What kinds of missiles does Ukraine need? And why doesn’t the West simply supply them to Kyiv?

Kyiv is developing — or seeking from its Western partners — a full range of cruise and ballistic missiles with varying ranges and payloads. Today, only Russia, the United States, China, and Israel possess such an arsenal. Strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles are the only weapons in this arsenal that Ukraine is not currently seeking.

Missiles can be broadly categorized by their range and payload, as well as by the type of engine that determines their flight profile.

• Cruise missiles of various ranges can fly and maneuver at low or extremely low altitudes at roughly the speed of sound or, less commonly, several times faster. This gives them an advantage against air-defense systems, which struggle to detect low-flying targets at long distances.
• Ballistic missiles typically travel at several times the speed of sound and follow elliptical trajectories. At the highest point in their flight, they can rise tens or even hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Destroying them requires high-speed interceptor missiles. The most effective interceptors, such as the Patriot system’s PAC-3, use kinetic energy to destroy missiles with a direct hit.

By range, the cruise and ballistic missiles Ukraine is seeking can be divided into short- and medium-range weapons. Short-range missiles can travel up to 300 kilometers and strike targets behind Russian lines and in occupied territories. Medium-range missiles can travel 500–1,000 kilometers and strike targets far behind enemy lines.

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The Ukrainian military already has Western-made short-range weapons: British Storm Shadow and French SCALP cruise missiles, as well as U.S.-made ATACMS ballistic missiles. Each carries a warhead weighing hundreds of kilograms but has a range of no more than 300 kilometers. Suppliers restrict their use, with U.S. rules tighter than those imposed by Britain and France, which allow regular Ukrainian strikes on Russian border regions. Supplies are also limited.

Several years ago, the United States also committed to begin supplying Ukraine with specially developed air-launched ERAM cruise missiles or glide bombs in the fall of 2026, with a range of up to 450 kilometers. The program’s current status is unknown.

Ukraine faces greater difficulties with long-range missiles. The United States refused to provide Kyiv with Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 kilometers. Ukraine lacks sufficient ground-based launchers for them anyway; the United States launches Tomahawks from ships and submarines. Ukraine’s Fire Point developed the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile and began using it in August 2025. But the program has yet to meet the manufacturer’s stated targets. Instead of producing the promised dozens or hundreds of missiles a month, Ukraine launches salvos of only a few missiles every few weeks.

Why is Ukraine’s missile program struggling? And can the Russian military shoot down Flamingos?

There are no definitive answers, but it is clear that Ukraine’s programs to develop and mass-produce cruise and ballistic missiles remain stalled at various stages.

Consider the most advanced program: production of the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile. Fire Point was expected to produce hundreds of Flamingos a year, allowing Ukraine to strike targets thousands of kilometers inside Russia with a powerful warhead. The Ukrainian military carried out its first test strike in August 2025, targeting buildings at an FSB border post on the boundary between Russian-annexed Crimea and the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region. Since then, about 10 more hits have been documented in video footage and satellite imagery. Salvos of three to six missiles have typically been launched every three to eight weeks.

Flamingos were last used on September 11, after a long hiatus. The target was the Volgogradpromproekt plant, which produces solid rocket fuel, among other products. The strike was not particularly successful. One missile exploded in an empty lot near the plant, while a second damaged one of its buildings. Once again, the damage fell short of what the missile’s stated specifications would suggest: Reports have said it carries a warhead weighing more than 1,000 kilograms.

Only a few of the 10 Flamingo strikes have been confirmed to have caused serious damage to their targets. One such target was the Skif-M plant in Belgorod, which Ukraine said was part of the supply chain for Russian military aircraft production. Four missiles hit the facility, just 60 kilometers from Kharkiv, causing extensive damage. Strikes on the ballistic-missile plant in Votkinsk, the VNIIR Progress military-navigation systems facility in Cheboksary and the Titan-Barrikady strategic-missile transport systems plant in Volgograd were also successful. A Flamingo strike also damaged an ammunition depot in Kotluban, in the Volgograd region.

Notably, strikes on targets closest to Ukraine were the most successful. This probably means the missiles can evade Russian air defenses more easily over shorter distances. The Flamingos may also be equipped with powerful warheads only when targeting nearby targets; the farther the target, the more fuel the missile must carry, at the expense of warhead weight.

Western and Ukrainian media have already suggested that the Russian military quickly learned to shoot down almost every Flamingo. According to this theory, Russia’s Aerospace Forces use A-50 airborne early-warning and control aircraft to detect the missiles from long range, then deploy combat aircraft to destroy them. Standard ground-based air-defense radar is known to struggle with the same task because Flamingos and similar missiles fly at low altitudes.

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The theory is plausible because the Soviet Air Force planned to use precisely this method against U.S. long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. Flamingos are also almost certainly far more visible to A-50 radar than Tomahawks because of their enormous size and lack of stealth features.

There is no evidence, however, that Russia regularly uses A-50 aircraft to hunt Ukrainian missiles. Although Russia’s Defense Ministry frequently says it has destroyed Flamingos, photographs of wreckage only occasionally support these claims. No statistics exist on how air defenses have actually performed against these missiles in combat.

The main problem is probably the extremely limited number of Flamingos. The small number of missiles in each salvo makes it harder to overwhelm air defenses, and the salvos themselves are exceedingly rare.

Fire Point executives say the main obstacle to mass production is securing engines for the Flamingo. This is a common problem for most countries starting their own missile programs.

The Flamingo uses the AI-25 aircraft turbojet engine, developed during the Soviet era at the Motor Sich plant in Zaporizhzhia. The Czechoslovak L-39 Albatros trainer aircraft, for example, used the same engine. Russian bombing has destroyed most of Motor Sich’s production facilities during the current war.

Fire Point acknowledges that it had to “collect engines from around the world.” The choice of a Motor Sich engine determined the missile’s size — it is twice as long as a Tomahawk, with three times the wingspan — and probably also limited production. Other Ukrainian projects have likewise failed to reach mass production. One example is the effort to adapt the Neptune anti-ship missile, which also uses a Motor Sich engine, to strike ground targets hundreds or thousands of kilometers from its launch site.

Fire Point executives say the company is developing new engines for the Flamingo and plans to begin mass-producing them in 2027.

Another problem is that European countries do not produce small turbojet engines for long-range cruise missiles. Safran makes these engines for the Storm Shadow/SCALP. The company also adapts its TR50 engines for use in the European Union’s only long-range cruise missile, France’s sea-launched Missile de Croisière Naval, or MdCN. The MdCN’s range and payload capacity are one-third lower than those of the Tomahawk.

The U.S. company Williams makes engines for the Tomahawk and supplies engines for European missiles, including Germany’s Taurus cruise missile, which has a considerably longer range than the Storm Shadow/SCALP. Germany, however, continues to refuse to supply Ukraine with these missiles. The United States clearly has no plans to expand exports of Williams engines because it intends to sharply increase its own production of Tomahawks and similar weapons.

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European Union countries recognize the problem. Safran and Rolls-Royce plan to develop new engines for the Stratus cruise missile, which will have a range of 1,000 kilometers, and to begin producing them by 2028.

Kyiv will almost certainly face — or may already be facing — similar problems obtaining rocket engines for ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s ballistic missile development has traditionally been handled by Dnipro-based Pivdenmash, which the Russian military has struck dozens of times. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the plant had failed to bring its Sapsan/Hrim tactical ballistic missile system, whose missiles have a range of up to 150 kilometers, into mass production. Nor is Europe likely to help: It does not produce engines for short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. Germany, for example, purchases Israeli missile systems.

Fire Point executives say the company is preparing to produce its own engines for the FP-7, its counterpart to ATACMS, and the FP-9, its counterpart to Russia’s Iskander. Engines are not the only foreseeable difficulty. Unlike cruise missile engines, which run on kerosene, Fire Point’s ballistic missiles require solid rocket fuel. The long-range FP-9s, which Ukraine plans to use against targets deep inside Russia, including Moscow, require particularly large amounts of fuel. A plant intended to produce it was being built in Denmark, but its opening has been postponed until 2027.

Long-range ballistic missiles, however, probably pose a greater threat than Flamingo cruise missiles even in small numbers. In theory, the Russian military has counterparts to the Patriot system — the already-deployed S-400 and the S-500, which is still entering service — along with specialized anti-ballistic missile interceptors. The interceptors are said to have capabilities similar to those of the American PAC-3, which has been used successfully against Iskanders and heavy Iranian ballistic missiles. But the Russian equivalents are new weapons that have not been tested in combat and are probably produced in extremely small quantities.

Fire Point has nevertheless managed to supply Ukraine with its most widely used long-range drones, the FP-1/FP-2 series, despite production-scaling problems, corruption allegations, and claims that the company was funded at the expense of other, potentially more advanced projects. The drones have proved effective in attacks on Russian oil refineries and warehouses.