Soviet Ukraine once built some of Moscow's deadliest missiles: the Yuzhmash plant in Dnipro produced the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, technology reportedly still echoing decades later in North Korea's own missile engines.

During the Soviet period, the Yuzhnoye design bureau in Dnipro designed the R-36M, while the associated Yuzhmash plant manufactured it. NATO designated the missile the SS-18 “Satan”. It was one of the Soviet Union’s most powerful ICBMs, with some variants carrying up to 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads.

Independence ended that; Kyiv gave up both its inherited nuclear arsenal and its missile-production base. When Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022, Ukraine had no missile industry of its own and depended entirely on Western supply.

That has changed fast. Over the past year Ukraine has built and scaled its own strike-missile industry from nothing, while pushing allies to help it close a second, harder gap: shooting Russian ballistic missiles down rather than just sending them back. "The war has gone into the air," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told leaders at the Ankara Nato summit on July 8, as Ukraine's own long-range drones and missiles increasingly dictate the war's terms rather than just responding to it.

Fire Point: the missile-maker that came from nowhere

Fire Point, founded only in 2022 after the invasion began, now makes around 100 long-range Flamingo cruise missiles a month, reports The Guardian, a rate its chief executive, Iryna Terekh said in an interview, it can sustain an enduring deep-strike campaign hundreds of miles inside Russia. Each Flamingo costs a little under $600,000, Terekh said — a fraction of the roughly $3.5mn cost of a US Tomahawk — and carries a 1,150kg warhead capable of penetrating concrete. One hit a Russian military-components factory in Cheboksary in June, a genuine flight of around 1,800km, among the longest recorded in cruise-missile history.

The company's lighter FP-1 and FP-2 drones, costing $55,000-$75,000 and produced at a rate of hundreds a day, have a range of more than 1,000km and are increasingly aimed at Russia's oil refineries — a campaign that has cut refining volumes and helped trigger the fuel crisis now easing only slowly across Russia. Fire Point now runs 83 factories in Ukraine plus one in Denmark and employs 6,000 people, up from 3,500 late last year, Terekh said; manufacturing had paused earlier this year during the delay in signing off the EU's €90bn lending package before resuming at scale.

The company's rapid rise has not been free of controversy. IntelliNews has reported on allegations, made by Zelenskiy's former press secretary Iuliia Mendel in April based on leaked recordings, that up to $7bn in state-linked investment could have flowed through Fire Point, with insiders connected to the Mindich/Energoatom corruption scandal potentially profiting; Fire Point separately holds roughly 10% of Ukraine's defence procurement budget. The Zelenskiy administration has not responded to the specific allegations.

Freyja: closing the ballistic-missile gap

Ukraine's harder problem is defence, not offence. It depends almost entirely on US-made Patriot systems, the only weapon in its arsenal that reliably intercepts Russian ballistic missiles travelling at several times the speed of sound, but Patriot supplies have been squeezed, dwindling stockpiles and a slow production cycle. Kyiv wants a prototype of a cheaper, European-built alternative, codenamed Freyja, ready by the first half of 2027, deputy Ukrainian security council secretary Davyd Aloian said last week.

The project grew out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition launched at a Paris summit in mid-July, where Zelenskiy warned that in the "drones vs missiles" race, ballistic missiles remain "Russia's last advantage." Ukraine will supply the launcher and interceptor missile; European partners — Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales, Saab and radar-maker Hensoldt among them — are contributing sensors, radars and guidance electronics under what Zelenskiy has compared to Lego-style open architecture, letting each country plug in its own component. Fire Point, maker of the Flamingo, is the project's lead industrial partner.

The Freyja push runs alongside Washington's own longer-term fix: President Donald Trump's pledge at the Ankara summit to license Ukraine to make Patriot missiles itself. Analysts caution that deal will help Ukraine's next war with Russia, not this one — building a Ukrainian PAC-3 production line is expected to take years.

The foreign-missile shelf

Ukraine's arsenal of supplied Western weapons remains patchy. US-made HIMARS rocket systems and ATACMS ballistic missiles have already been in Ukrainian service for several years. The UK and France have supplied Storm Shadow and its French-built sister missile, SCALP-EG, and are restarting joint production after a 15-year pause; Germany's more powerful Taurus missile has never been delivered despite Chancellor Friedrich Merz saying he had changed the rules to allow it. The US Tomahawk, also more powerful than what Ukraine currently fields, has likewise never been supplied to Kyiv — even as Washington has fired hundreds of Tomahawks of its own in the Iran war this year.

While Ukraine is running to develop and produce homemade missiles, Russia is not standing still. Moscow is expanding its own missile arsenal faster than Ukraine and its allies can keep pace, fielding new hybrid drone-missile designs such as the Banderol alongside upgraded Geran-5 attack drones, and producing enough missiles of all types to fire roughly half a dozen at Ukraine daily. Ukraine cannot afford to wait: with Russia reportedly stockpiling munitions for a expected winter offensive, Kyiv is accelerating its own missile programme now rather than banking on foreign deliveries that keep slipping.