The Missile Makers: How a Ukrainian Start-Up Is Defending a Nation, One Cruise Missile at a Time
The war in Ukraine has produced many kinds of heroes—soldiers, medics, volunteers who haul generators through blackout nights. But few are as quietly formidable as Iryna Terekh, the CEO of Fire Point. She doesn’t carry a rifle or drive an ambulance. She builds cruise missiles. And she builds them at a pace that would make any defense contractor in the world take notice.
Terekh leads a start-up that, just two years after its founding in the rubble of postwar Ukraine, is now manufacturing about 100 Flamingo cruise missiles every month. That’s enough to sustain an enduring campaign of deep strikes against targets hundreds of miles inside Russia. Alongside those, Fire Point churns out FP-1 and FP-2 fixed-wing drones at a rate of “hundreds per day.” This is not a story about a billionaire writing a check from a safe distance. This is a story about engineers and factory workers, operating under blackout alerts and missile threats, building the hardware that keeps their country in the fight.
The scale of the operation is staggering. Each Flamingo missile carries 1,150 kilograms of explosive—enough to punch through reinforced concrete. In June, one was used to attack a Russian military components factory at Cheboksary, more than 600 miles from Kharkiv. Terekh notes that the actual flight distance, due to evasive routing, was among “the longest recorded in the history of cruise missile missions”—roughly 1,800 kilometers, or 1,118 miles. And here’s the part that changes the equation: each Flamingo costs under $600,000. A comparable U.S. Tomahawk runs about $3.5 million. The lighter FP-1 drones, used to strike less heavily defended Russian oil refineries, cost between $55,000 and $75,000 apiece. That’s not charity; it’s asymmetric warfare made affordable.
Fire Point’s rise has not been smooth. Production paused earlier this year when a €90 billion European Union lending package was delayed. The company’s very existence depends on a fragile web of international financing and domestic grit. But the pause is over, and the assembly lines are running again. Terekh says she’s not aware of a single deep-strike attack in recent months that didn’t involve Fire Point products. On average, five to 15 of their missiles and drones are launched daily. That rhythm—steady, relentless, industrial—has become a lifeline for Ukraine’s military, which for years was denied long-range strike capabilities by Western allies wary of escalation.
The impact of those strikes is measurable. The campaign against Russian oil refineries has cut their production by 20 percent, leading to long queues at petrol pumps across Russia. It’s a textbook example of how a smaller, nimbler force can impose real economic pain on a larger adversary—not by winning a tank battle, but by hitting the fuel supply chain. For Ukraine, this isn’t just about military tactics. It’s about survival. And for the global philanthropic and defense community, it’s a masterclass in how targeted, cost-effective innovation can change the course of a war.
What Terekh and her team have done is more than manufacture weapons. They have built a culture of giving—giving time, ingenuity, and risk—on a national scale. Fire Point is not a charity; it’s a for-profit company. But its mission is profoundly philanthropic: to protect a democracy under siege, to give soldiers a tool that might bring them home, and to prove that a start-up can outmaneuver a superpower’s military-industrial complex. In a world where philanthropy often means writing a check for a library wing, this is giving of a different kind—giving a country the ability to fight back. That’s not just generosity. That’s a gift of sovereignty.
