Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh remembers the moment in February when long-range cruise missiles manufactured by her defense technology company struck a Russian arms factory in Votkinsk, nearly 900 miles from Ukraine. The Votkinsk plant manufactures the Kinzhal and Iskander ballistic missiles that Moscow regularly rains down on Kyiv and other cities. Three of Fire Point’s powerful Flamingo missiles hit the plant’s electroplating and stamping facility, and a Russian video captured a giant fireball burning on the horizon.
“We’re finally hitting the archer,” Terekh, a small, slender engineer with dark hair and aviator glasses, tells me with a smile. “That’s much more effective than stopping the arrows. Votkinsk was my first sense that something was really changing.”
The Votkinsk strike was just the beginning. Ukraine has been pounding Russia with long-range weapons—missiles and drones—all spring. After one startling mid-May assault on Moscow, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported intercepting 628 drones over 14 regions, destroying 120 above Moscow. Ukrainian strikes damaged critical infrastructure across Russia, including the Moscow Oil Refinery and a major semiconductor plant, killing three, injuring 18, and causing severe delays at the capital’s main international airport.
Particularly stunning and effective are the now almost daily Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian oil facilities. Kyiv has doubled the tempo of attacks in recent months, boosting the effect with repeated hits on the same refinery—sometimes several in a single week. In late May, Reuters reported the attacks had stopped or scaled back operations at all major fuel refineries in central Russia, cutting 30 percent of Russia’s gasoline output and 25 percent of its diesel fuel production. What Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wryly calls “long-range sanctions” also target Russian pipelines and storage facilities. The campaign has forced the Kremlin to halt gasoline exports and dented the tax revenues Moscow relies on to finance its war machine.
Fire Point’s Iyrna Terekh isn’t the only one who feels this moment may be a turning point. The war is far from over. Russia slammed Kyiv last week—one of the largest aerial assaults since the fighting began—with 600 drones and 90 missiles, including a rarely used Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile, killing at least four people and injuring more than 90. Russia still has more of everything—missiles, drones, soldiers, and financial resources—than Ukraine. Vladimir Putin shows no signs of giving up. A desperate Putin will surely be a more dangerous Putin.
Yet many Ukrainians feel they have what strategists call “the initiative”—forward momentum that forces Moscow to respond to Kyiv’s terms of engagement. It’s not just about long-range strikes. Elon Musk’s February decision to halt Russian troops’ illegal use of Starlink terminals, and Ukrainian middle-range drone bombardment—up to 155 miles behind enemy front lines—also play a significant part, pushing back Moscow’s command centers, complicating its logistics, and slowing its battlefield advances.
Kyiv has all but halted Russian gains along the 1,000-mile front line, and the Ukrainian defense industry continues to roll out new weaponry—still longer-range missiles, more sophisticated drones, better electronic warfare jammers, and interceptors to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.
Yet long-range strikes—also called long-range fires and deep-precision strikes—are in a class of their own, critical not just for Ukraine but also for European defense and deterrence.
The short-range Ukrainian drones that captured the world’s attention rely on very simple technology—easy modifications to devices widely used for agriculture and photography. Longer-range fires, especially deep-strike missiles, are something else entirely.
It was no accident that Hitler called them Wunderwaffen, or miracle weapons. The Nazis made two varieties—V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 ballistic missiles. They didn’t win the war for Germany, as Hitler hoped, but they terrorized Britain for two years, causing widespread destruction and thousands of civilian deaths. Today, both Ukraine and America’s NATO allies see long-range fires as essential weapons against Moscow. But neither Kyiv nor Europe have enough of the weaponry they need.
President Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw troops from Germany was largely symbolic; far more consequential was the cancellation of a deployment, promised in 2024 by President Joe Biden, that would have stationed a battalion equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles on German soil. Without U.S.-produced Tomahawks, which can flatten a building or destroy an airfield as far as 1,000 miles away, European NATO states have no conventional deep-strike capabilities to deter or punish a Russian assault.
Long-range cruise and ballistic missiles launched from Russian soil can hit Berlin and Warsaw; those launched from Russia’s Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad, can hit London and Paris. Yet Europe has nothing comparable with which to hit back. Its only long-range weapons carry nuclear warheads, and no one in Europe wants to initiate a nuclear conflict. That’s why defense officials from London to Warsaw believe Putin has a veritable invitation to attack during the a five-year window before Europe can develop its own conventional deep-strike missiles.
Fire Point produces a spectrum of long-range fires—drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Founded in 2022 with just 18 workers, it now employs over 6,000 technicians at 70 locations across Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s best-known and best-connected arms manufacturers, the firm is at once much admired and much criticized. Recent reports implicate it in the corruption scandal that forced Zelensky’s number two to resign last year. Fire Point denies any wrongdoing and is widely seen as too successful to fail, too integral to the Ukrainian war effort, and too tied to European hopes for timely long-range missile production.
I spoke to Terekh in her spare office in a nondescript building that blends into a modest residential neighborhood—a location chosen for security reasons. A building not far away serves as one of Fire Point’s dispersed production hubs, filled with buzzing 3D printers and technicians huddled over workbenches, while others pack components for the front line. Terekh and cofounder Denys Shtilerman, a big, solidly built man with close-cropped hair, are determined to produce as much as possible in-house, including rocket engines, solid rocket fuel, and navigational components for the Fire Point’s growing product line.
“I never liked the idea of a Wunderwaffe,” Terekh reflects. “Most situations require a combination of missiles and drones.” Missiles are faster and more powerful; drones are cheaper. A Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo missile can carry a 2,500-pound explosive payload deep into Russia. The company’s FP-1 deep-strike drones carry just a fraction of that but cost only €50,000—a sliver of the missile price and less than one-third of what a similar device would cost in Europe.
“Our soldiers are squeezing the maximum out of very cheap systems,” Shtilerman explains. “Also, an oil refinery is a huge area, and even a high-explosive FP-5 cannot demolish the whole facility. But if you aim 20 FP-1s in just the right way, you can shut down the refinery.”
This spring’s hits relied on several Fire Point systems. Its FP-2 middle-strike drones helped take out Russian air defenses just over the border. Then, a combination of long-range FP-1s and Flamingo cruise missiles headed for the target, whether an oil refinery or other critical infrastructure. Fire Point is only one of many Ukrainian companies developing deep-strike missiles. It’s estimated to have produced roughly one-third of the drones used in recent long-range attacks.
The firm’s focus now is on a critical next step for Ukrainian long-range strike power: perfecting ballistic missiles, which fly in a parabolic arc rather than along the horizon, making them much harder to intercept.
Fire Point’s approach incorporates many of the lessons learned by Ukraine over four-plus years of battling Russia—the shortcuts, improvisations, and innovations that make the country’s way of war so different from traditional tactics and strategy. In addition to asymmetry—using a cheap drone to take down an expensive enemy system—and a relentless focus on cost, Fire Point never loses sight of what Terekh calls the “user experience.”
“Unlike most weapons systems,” she explains, “which were designed by arms experts and military men, most new Ukrainian weapons are being developed by people like me who have never built a weapon before—people more likely to think about ease of use and user safety.” That’s why the Flamingo is ground-launched rather than air- or sea-launched like most other deep-strike missiles. This makes the FP-5 easier to hide and safer to use—no pilots need fly risky sorties over enemy territory—making up for what it loses in power from a stationary launch.
At the same time, Terekh says the company is relying on Ukrainian pilots to innovate on the go, perfecting their technique and sending feedback to the company to improve the weapon’s performance. “In 2022,” Terekh tells me, “we needed four expensive, U.S.-made Patriot interceptors to down one incoming Russian ballistic missile. Now the ratio is one-to-one. We’re counting on the same effect to improve Flamingo accuracy. It’s all about the soldier’s tactics and capabilities—the know-how they develop as they use the weapon in combat.”
Third and most important to Terekh, Fire Point leadership is determined to advance Ukrainian independence—the nation’s capacity to defend itself without relying on fickle allies. “Again and again, over the past four years,” she says, “we’ve had to beg our partners for help—for tanks, for planes, for long-range missiles. But the response was always too little, too late—we kept missing the moment to turn the war around, and Ukrainian soldiers paid in blood.” Now, when a Ukrainian fighter needs a weapon, “he doesn’t have to wait.”
Terekh and Shtilerman say that many European countries are eager to buy weapons or co-produce them, either inside or outside Ukraine. Like most Ukrainian companies, Fire Point puts domestic needs first. The firm has benefited from European subsidies that help Kyiv buy drones for the Ukrainian army; it has also entered into a joint venture to produce solid rocket fuel in Denmark that will be shipped to Ukraine for use against Russia. But the company does not envision selling missiles to Europe until all Ukraine’s needs have been met—at least a year or two down the road.
That rules out Ukraine as a quick solution for NATO’s long-range missile gap. Still, Terekh predicts, Ukrainian deep-strike weapons will become available long before any country in Europe develops its own.
Looking to the future, the company’s leadership is eager to collaborate with European partners to develop what Shtilerman calls a continental “anti-ballistic missile shield”—a system to replace U.S.-made Patriot systems, currently the only weapon capable of downing Russian ballistic missiles, with an alternative that doesn’t rely on Washington.
As Shtilerman imagines it, some half-dozen European countries would produce components—ground-based radars, homing warheads, a tactical data link, and a control unit. Fire Point would produce missiles—a variant of the FP-7 ballistic missile now being tested and improved in the field in Ukraine. He and Terekh say that several European capitals have expressed interest in collaborating, and Fire Point is determined that its product will come without strings attached.
“There will be no kill switch and no conditions,” Terekh maintains. “As Ukraine learned the hard way”—when the Trump Pentagon turned off software updates for American missiles in use on the eastern front—“that’s a recipe for disaster. We shouldn’t be able to influence the destiny of a weapon once it’s out in the world.”
Independence is Fire Point’s watchword. Ukraine must be independent; it wants its European partners to be able to fight independently, and it wants to revolutionize the way weapons are made and sold to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturers subject to shifting political winds.
Terekh tells a story about wandering among manufacturers’ booths at a defense tech exposition and hearing a common refrain. “All the Western companies’ slogans and advertising emphasized safety,” she recalls. “The product they were selling was safety, and it got me thinking—what really is our final product?” Then it dawned on her, she says: “Our product—what we provide for our partners and the Ukrainian soldiers we equip—is safety plus independence.”
It’s a radical message for Ukraine and for Europe, long reliant on American weaponry and global leadership: no country’s security should rest on the uncertain goodwill of its patrons or suppliers.
