Fire Point CEO: From Architect to Ukraine's Missile Builder

Iryna Terekh trained as an architect. Today she runs one of Ukraine's most closely watched weapons makers, and in a wide-ranging interview published August 3 by The War Zone, she laid out how far Fire Point has come from its garage-built origins, and how much further it intends to go.

Terekh, 35, took over as chief executive after joining Fire Point in 2023, when the company was still a casting operation pivoting into defense production. She helped scale it into the manufacturer behind the FP-1 and FP-2 strike drones and the Flamingo cruise missile, weapons that now account for a large share of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian territory and shipping in the Sea of Azov.

FP-9 nears its first test flight

The most significant disclosure concerns the FP-9, a ballistic missile designed to reach roughly 850 kilometers, putting Moscow within range. Terekh said the engines, which burn 4.6 tons of solid rocket propellant compared to one ton for the smaller FP-7, are now being cast, with test launches expected in the autumn. Building that capability meant standing up new solid-fuel casting infrastructure in Ukraine and in Denmark, after the existing Pavlograd facility came under sustained Russian attack.

Fire Point is also developing the FP-7.x, a lower-cost interceptor intended as a more plentiful alternative to Patriot munitions. Terekh said the goal is a unit cost under one million euros in serial production, with imaging infrared seekers supplied in part by Diehl Defense. She was careful to frame the first iteration as closer in performance to the older PAC-2 than to the hit-to-kill PAC-3, with an initial production target of at least 2,000 interceptors a year.

A German tie-up and a satellite ambition

Fire Point is in talks with Diehl Defense to produce Flamingo missiles in Germany, an arrangement Terekh described as a way for both companies to trade industrial knowledge. She declined to detail the technical scope, citing ongoing negotiations, but confirmed the German government initiated the discussion as part of a broader push for domestically produced long-range strike capability.

Looking further out, Terekh said Fire Point's biggest undisclosed project is a satellite constellation intended to give its drones independent connectivity, reducing reliance on third-party systems for navigation and targeting over long distances. She said the company is already working with a satellite manufacturer and experimenting with larger rocket engines, though she called the effort secondary to winning the war.

Production numbers, and a reality check

Fire Point has previously said it aims to reach a daily Flamingo production rate of seven missiles, or roughly 2,555 a year, by October. Terekh clarified that this reflects maximum built capacity rather than actual output, which has run below that ceiling while Ukraine waits on financing tied to a European Union loan. She expects output to climb toward the stated rate by early next year, depending on how quickly contracts materialize.

She also pushed back on criticism that Flamingo has underperformed on accuracy, arguing that after-action reviews show consistent improvement against Russian short-range air defenses like the Pantsir and Tor systems, with aircraft remaining the missile's only unresolved vulnerability.

The interview offers one of the clearer pictures yet of how a company built by volunteers in a garage now runs roughly 90 dispersed production sites, negotiates with European primes, and plans to treat its weapons less as one-time hardware sales and more as an ongoing service, updated the way a smartphone is.