Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
For more than four years, Ukraine has launched Western-made rockets at Russian lines, usually under tight rules from the capitals that supplied them.
Ukraine’s dependence on allied precision weapons eased a notch on Thursday
In a short Telegram clip, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Kyiv had fired a ballistic missile of its own make at a Russian target, the first combat use of a weapon Ukrainian engineers have been racing to field.
“Ukrainian tactical ballistic missile. FP-7. First combat use. Thank you for the result. Next – production,” Zelenskyy said in the post, carried by Ukrainska Pravda. He did not name the target, the location, or the time of the strike.
Pressed afterward on where the missile had landed, a Zelenskyy communications adviser answered flatly: “We’re not telling,” according to the Kyiv Independent.
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A missile Ukraine built itself
The FP-7 is produced by Fire Point, a Kyiv-based defense firm founded in 2022 that already supplies long-range strike drones and the FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missile to the Ukrainian military.
The missile has a claimed range of up to 250 kilometers, carries a 200-kilogram warhead, and reaches a terminal speed of 1,500 meters per second, according to the Kyiv Independent and a technical writeup from the Hague Code of Conduct research team at the EU Non-Proliferation Consortium.
The company’s chief designer and co-founder, Denys Shtilerman, compared the FP-7 to the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, the long-range weapon Washington began supplying to Ukraine in 2023.
In an interview in March, Shtilerman said the Ukrainian missile would be “an analog of ATACMS, probably even with a larger warhead” while costing “at least twice as little” to produce, the Kyiv Independent reported.
From test range to combat in months
The first flight test took place in February 2026, according to the Hague Code of Conduct writeup. Speaking at a defense conference in Poland on September 10, Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh said the missile would enter service “within weeks,” a schedule the Thursday announcement broadly matches.
The FP-7 is designed for front-line Russian positions and immediate rear-area targets such as command posts, weapons storage, radar stations, electronic warfare systems, air defense launchers and airfields within range, Ukrainian analyst Nazarii Barchuk told the Kyiv Independent.
