FP-5 Flamingo

Ukraine's homegrown heavy cruise missile, built to strike deep inside Russia with a one-tonne warhead at a fraction of the cost of Western equivalents — a "big, cheap, and numerous" engineering gamble that has already blown up ammunition bunkers and missile factories.

Overview

The FP-5 Flamingo (Фламінго) is a Ukrainian ground-launched, long-range cruise missile developed by the post-2022 defence startup Fire Point. It carries a claimed ~1,150 kg warhead out to a manufacturer-stated range of 3,000 km, intentionally built as a cheap, mass-producible weapon to bring the whole of European Russia within reach — including 90% of Russia’s arms-manufacturing capacity, according to Ukrainian analysis Wikipedia. The missile’s radical cost engineering — recycled trainer-jet engines, a simple fiberglass airframe, and GNSS-only guidance — puts its unit price at roughly half a million dollars, a fraction of a Tomahawk. After a secret development programme, the Flamingo was publicly revealed by Associated Press factory access in August 2025 and entered combat weeks later; by mid-2026 it had struck targets as distant as Cheboksary and Votkinsk, although its accuracy and mass-production claims remain under intense scrutiny Covert Shores AP.

Development

Fire Point was founded after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, drawing personnel from construction, game design, and architecture. While the company first made its reputation with the FP-1 deep-strike drone, work on a heavy cruise missile began as Western partners refused to supply long-range weapons The War Zone. The design lineage is intertwined with the UK-registered, UAE-based Milanion Group, which exhibited an identical FP-5 at IDEX 2025; analysts suggest the arrangement allowed Ukraine to buy up AI-25 engines on the global market under cover of a commercial display Wikipedia. The missile broke cover on 17–18 August 2025 when AP journalists visited the factory, and President Zelenskyy declared serial production on 20 August. By autumn the company claimed a rate of 2–3 missiles per day, targeting 7 per day later in 2026 The War Zone. A February 2026 Russian strike temporarily halted output, but production resumed soon after Wikipedia. The programme’s political dimension deepened when Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) launched an investigation into alleged price inflation on Fire Point’s FP-1 contracts, with questions also raised about links to Zelenskyy-associate Timur Mindich — a probe that froze a Czech crowdfunded purchase of a Flamingo missile Kyiv Independent, corruption probe.

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