KYIV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian firm behind many of the long-range drone strikes that now regularly hit Russian oil refineries hundreds of miles inside its borders is moving into missile defense, signing a major deal this month to build a low-cost ballistic missile interceptor with foreign partners — a turn that positions the company as a key provider at both ends of the deep-strike war.
Fire Point makes the munitions bolstering much of Ukraine’s campaign against targets deep inside Russia, including the FP-1 deep-strike drone, the shorter-range FP-2 and the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile.
Last week, the firm announced plans to build the shield against Russian missiles, penning an agreement with German radar maker Hensoldt to produce a ballistic-missile defense system called Freyja.
Fire Point-produced drones currently carry out about 60% of Ukraine’s strikes inside Russia, company co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilerman said at Eurosatory, the biennial global weapons expo, held in France this month.
“These are the drones responsible for what you see burning on your TV screens on the territory of [Russia],” he told Ukrainian National News in Paris.
Those strikes are the engine of Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” — a term coined by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a campaign that sends long-range drones and missiles against Russian oil refineries, fuel depots and arms plants hundreds of miles inside the country, aiming to choke the fuel and revenue that sustain Moscow’s war.
As a centerpiece of Kyiv’s counteroffensive and its fast-growing defense-tech sector, Fire Point now draws attention from both foreign partners — and domestic corruption investigators — in spades.
Last month, Zelenskyy approved a fresh slate of long-range strike plans in May. “The plan of our Ukrainian long-range sanctions is being implemented precisely as intended,” he confirmed on June 10.
Fire Point is central to this campaign.
Its new FP-2 drone struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Tyumen region on June 20 — a target 1,286 miles from the Ukrainian border, Zelenskyy said — and the company says its rebuilt FP-1 now flies 1,677 miles up from 1,025 miles, while the FP-2 can carry a 440-pound warhead up to 230 miles away.
“The new modernized FP drones have been tested. Now they can reach targets at a distance of 3,000 kilometers. I am grateful to the Fire Point engineers,” Zelenskyy said in his June 20 evening address.
Ukraine has already logged at least 28 strikes on Russian oil infrastructure in June, knocking out or disrupting refineries that account for a large share of Russia’s fuel production, helping drive gasoline output to multi-year lows and forcing Moscow to restrict domestic sales, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Now Fire Point is delving into the defense end of the battle with the joint German-Ukrainian production of the FP-7.X interceptor system named Freyja.
“Fire Point is joining the anti-ballistic coalition,” Shtilerman wrote on X on May 14. “Soon, interceptor missiles will be in the skies not only of Ukraine but of all of Europe.”
Freyja would wrap the interceptor in radar, tracking and command systems from a row of European firms — Fire Point points to the deal with Hensoldt and to talks with Thales on radar, Leonardo on tracking and Kongsberg on command and control.
The company’s aim is to bring a ballistic missile down for under $1 million a shot, against the several million dollars a U.S. Patriot can burn through in two or three interceptors to stop a single missile, Shtilerman told Reuters in April.
“If we can decrease it to less than $1 million, it will be… a game changer in air defense solutions,” he said. “We plan to intercept the first ballistic missile at the end of 2027.”
The FP-7.X is designed to hit a ballistic missile at 15 miles altitude for about $700,000 a shot — $300,000 under the original target — against roughly $3.8 million for a Patriot PAC-3. Fire Point aims to mass produce it at three a day starting in August.
Fire Point flight-tested the FP-7.X in early June, a “fully controlled maneuvering flight,” co-founder Iryna Terekh wrote on X alongside a video of the launch.
Shtilerman frames the move into missile defense as proof that Ukraine has become a weapons supplier, not just a recipient of Western arms donations.
“Ukraine is now not only a consumer of some aid but has already become a provider of security solutions for all of Europe, and perhaps for the whole world,” he told UNN.
Fire Point’s rise to the top of Ukraine’s arms industry has not come without scrutiny.
The company did not exist before Russia’s 2022 invasion, when it was a film and television casting agency. It is now one of Ukraine’s biggest military contractors, holding more than $1 billion in government deals this year, according to The New York Times.
The money has put Fire Point inside Ukraine’s widening corruption fight. The company was named in leaked recordings tied to Timur Mindich, a businessman and longtime associate of President Zelenskyy who fled Ukraine amid a sweeping energy corruption case, and is under investigation by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, according to the Kyiv Independent.
Fire Point has denied that Mindich holds any stake, saying it belongs only to its co-founders, and no charges have been filed against the firm. The company has also moved to court Western backing, naming former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to its advisory board in November.
Zelenskyy said the next Fire Point drones will reach 1,864 miles, far enough to put refineries and arms plants in the Urals and western Siberia within range.
Fire Point has said it aims to deliver on the president’s promise by this summer.
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