Somewhere inside Ukraine, beyond a blindfolded car ride and layers of operational security, a secret factory turning out one of the country’s newest deep-strike weapons, the Flamingo cruise missile, is ramping up production. Phones are switched off before visitors step inside. Cameras are carefully kept away from pillars, windows, ceilings, and even workers’ faces as they move along an assembly line where black-painted missiles take shape at different stages of completion.
The company behind the project, Fire Point, has already seen two of its facilities hit, a reminder of how aggressively Russia targets Ukraine’s emerging arms industry. That is why dispersing and hiding production sites has become central to survival. Even under fire, President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine now produces more than half of the weapons it uses on the front line, and that almost its entire long-range arsenal is domestically built. What began with Soviet-era stockpiles and emergency shipments of Western kit has evolved into a defense eco-system that leads much of the world in unmanned systems – from frontline drones to robotics.
The Flamingo itself is designed to push that edge further. It is a jet-powered cruise missile with a range said to reach 3,000km, roughly on par with a US-made Tomahawk that Washington has declined to transfer to Kyiv. Physically, it evokes the German V1 rocket from World War Two, a large engine perched on top of a tube the length of a London bus. Painted black, not the pink of its early prototypes, the missile is described by Fire Point’s chief technical officer, Iryna Terekh, as a weapon that “eats Russian oil.” The system has already been used in combat, though the company will not detail which targets it has struck.
For Ukraine’s military, weapons like the Flamingo fit into a broader deep-strike strategy aimed at Russia’s war economy. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, estimates that long-range strikes have already cost Russia more than $21.5 billion this year, as oil refineries, weapons factories, and ammunition depots are hit far from the front, according to reporting on Ukraine’s domestic arms industry. An officer in Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces, identified as Ruslan, puts the logic simply: the goal is to “reduce the enemy’s military capabilities and their economic potential.” His units have carried out hundreds of these missions deep in enemy territory, even as Russia responds with its own relentless barrage of Shahed drones and missiles.
Russia’s long-range attacks have produced sweeping blackouts and infrastructure damage across Ukraine, while its drone output — around 3,000 Shaheds a month, with roughly 200 launched on an average day — still outpaces Kyiv’s. Fire Point is trying to close that gap by scaling up at speed. The company, which did not exist before Russia’s full-scale invasion, is now producing around 200 drones a day. Its FP1 and FP2 models, each roughly the size of a small airplane, are credited with carrying out about 60% of Ukraine’s long-range strikes. At an estimated $50,000 per unit, they come in at roughly a third of the cost of a Russian Shahed drone.
Yet even with that industrial surge, Ukraine still needs outside help – especially for intelligence, targeting support, and financing. At the same time, Fire Point is working to insulate its supply chain from political mood swings abroad. Terekh says the company has made a deliberate choice to source as many components as possible from within Ukraine and to avoid parts from both China and the United States. In her words, the relationship with Washington is an “emotional roller coaster,” and any future decision to halt exports could suddenly ground weapons built around US components.
Until late last year, under President Biden, the United States had provided nearly $70 billion in military aid to Ukraine, but that flow has since stopped under President Trump, who has instead set up a scheme for European NATO countries to purchase US weapons. The United States is no longer Kyiv’s largest military backer, and Europe has struggled to fully replace what Washington once supplied. Those uncertainties feed directly into debates about future security guarantees at the ongoing peace talks. Terekh dismisses the current discussions as “capitulation talks” and argues that a truly durable guarantee can come only from Ukraine building its own arsenal.
Fire Point’s Latin motto translates roughly to “if not us, then who,” and that ethos runs through the company’s culture. Terekh herself was once an architecture student; now she stands beside a long-range missile and talks about shocking the rest of Europe into recognizing what a full-scale war on the continent really looks like. Co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilerman, for his part, rejects the idea of any single “Wunderwaffe” that will decide the conflict. “The game changer is our will to win,” he says. In that sense, the secret missile factory is not just about hardware. It is a statement that Ukraine intends to control its own defense destiny, and a warning to other European states that they may one day have to do the same.
