Ukraine's armed forces have taken into service the Alexa Spatium, the first jet-powered interceptor drone designed and built in the country to shoot down Russian attack drones.

The Alexa Spatium, Ukraine's first domestically designed jet-powered interceptor drone, now codified for service.

The aircraft is aimed squarely at Russia's Geran-3, Geran-4 and Geran-5 attack drones and the Shahed-131, and can also go after reconnaissance UAVs and helicopters. It runs on a turbojet, has a high service ceiling and works at low and medium altitudes, Ukrinform reported.

It measures roughly 1.5 by 1.7 metres, is built from composite so it can turn hard without losing control, and launches from a mobile catapult in minutes. It can carry fragmentation, shaped-charge or thermobaric warheads, and flies on preset coordinates or under direct control using television and infrared seekers.

The reusability is the unusual part. An interceptor that goes up, finds nothing and comes back to its launch point can fly again, which changes the cost arithmetic of air defence more than any single performance figure does.

Ukraine has spent this war shooting cheap Iranian-designed drones down with expensive Western missiles, and its interceptor stocks have been running dry. Moscow made the gap worse by bolting jet engines onto the Geran so it outruns the propeller-driven interceptors Kyiv had been fielding. A domestic jet answer that can be built in quantity is the first credible reply.

The manufacturer has not been named.

Ukraine's missile programmes are moving at the same time. Fire Point has finished ground testing of its FP-9 ballistic missile and is preparing to test it over Russian territory, chief executive and chief technology officer Iryna Terekh said, declining to give a date beyond "in the near future". An extended-range version is in development.

Fire Point systems are already flying between five and 20 missions a day over enemy territory, Terekh said. The company's Flamingo cruise missile is one of three candidates Germany is weighing for its own low-cost long-range weapon, which is a measure of how far Ukraine's defence industry has travelled from importing everything to selling into Nato markets.