re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict.

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Sometimes you don’t have to outsmart your enemy, you can take advantage of their dumb mistakes.

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Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point said it carried out the first flight test of its FP-7.x anti-missile interceptor last week, which co-founder Denys Shtilierman labelled “pretty successful” in an interview with the FT.

Fire Point says the FP-7.x is intended to counter Russian ballistic missile and drone threats at a fraction of the cost of existing western systems, such as Lockheed Martin’s Patriot and the Franco-Italian SAMP-T, and could eventually be produced in far larger numbers.

Mass production of the missile could begin in August, Shtilierman said, pending the delivery of an infrared seeker for guidance, which Fire Point was hoping to source from Germany’s Diehl Defence. The completed missiles would be ready by 2027, he said.

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The rest of the air defence system — known as Freyja — including radars used to detect and target aircraft, and the command and control system will come from European partners. Fire Point declined to confirm or deny who it was working with, but European and Ukrainian officials say Fire Point has had discussions with Germany’s Hensoldt and Thales for radar, Italy’s Leonardo for tracking and target acquisition radar, and Norway’s Kongsberg for command and control technology.

“Finishing this depends on the speed of our western partners and when they start moving,” Shtilierman said.

US defence conglomerate Lockheed Martin produces hundreds of interceptors a year for the Patriot system but most of the production has gone to replacing stocks used up in the war with Iran.

Ukrainian experts say that the nightly drumbeat of Russian air attacks, as well as the slow replacement of the PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles, has dented confidence in the Patriot system.

“Whatever we could, we replaced with our own domestic production, but we still cannot replace PAC-3. “We are already working with several countries . . . on the development of European anti-ballistic capabilities,” said Zelenskyy, in apparent reference to Freyja.

Shtilierman said his interceptor cost $700,000, compared with $3.8mn per missile for the Patriot PAC-3, according to 2026 budget estimates published by the US Army. Fire Point could manufacture three per day starting in August that could be stored until the seeker could be attached, he added.

The fast pace of manufacturing in Ukraine compared with western countries has, to a large part, been made possible by the war economy, which fast-tracks military production.

“Today we have probably the least bureaucratic approach to the production of anything in aerospace,” said Shtilierman.

The most difficult part of developing anti-ballistic missiles, according to defence consultant Marc Lange, is that they are hard to test. “Only lots of operational use and engineering work can help break this curse,” he said.

“On the other hand, Ukraine has the gift and the curse of constant Russian ballistic missile attacks, which is one factor that could help compress the timeline.”

Fire Point was met with scepticism last year when it announced it would build cheap cruise missiles. But it has had recent successes with its FP-1 long-range drone targeting Russian refineries and a warship near St Petersburg. The middle-range FP-2 variant is also used extensively by Ukrainian forces to hammer Russian logistical routes in Moscow-held Ukrainian regions. Zelenskyy on Wednesday confirmed the successful deployment of Fire Point’s [8 ton, 2500 lb warhead] “Flamingo” long-range missile, which he said had “struck a military plant in Cheboksary”, more than 900km beyond the front line.

Experts say the [FP-2] missiles, which are not particularly stealthy, are able to take advantage of sparse radar coverage in Russia because of the country’s size.

Unlike the Patriot, which is guided by advanced ground-based targeting radar, the FP-7.x is radar guided but uses a heat seeker for the “last mile” according to a Fire Point representative. Heat seeking is generally held to be less effective than radar targeting because of the availability of spoofing and countermeasures.

Tom Karako, a missile defence expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the FP-7.x could add to Ukraine’s air defence arsenal, which includes old Soviet systems, US Hawk missiles and modern German IRIS-T interceptors.

But he added that the Freyja system was unlikely to be a full substitute for more advanced systems such as the Patriot. “When you’ve got that full spectrum of threats, you need a lot of different tools,” Karako said. “The Patriot is a very exquisite capability, and so maybe ‘supplements’ may be a better formulation than ‘substitute’.”

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I hope you don’t handicap sports.

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