Both weapons come from one company, Fire Point, which did not exist when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Fire Point Missiles: Periphery to Gamechanger in Three Years
Fire Point was founded in mid-2022. Its founding logic was that Ukraine had far fewer resources than Russia, so it had to fight asymmetrically, with something cheap, close to mass production, and effective. That produced the FP-1, a propeller-driven one-way attack drone built as Ukraine’s answer to the Russian-Iranian Shahed. The FP-1 uses a cheap airframe with a plywood load-bearing structure, and almost 90% of its components are sourced from Ukraine.
During the four years of war, Fire Point’s scale-up had been remarkably efficient. The company grew from fewer than 20 employees to about 2,200 now, with revenue increasing in tow, jumping from $4 million in 2023 to over $100 million in 2024. Moreover, Fire Point has thrived in territory dominated by state-run primes: the FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, with a 3,000 km range and a 1,150 kg warhead; the FP-7.X interceptor; the Freyja air-defense project; and newly announced ballistic missiles. In just three years, the company evolved from buyer to builder.
Exporting Ukraine’s Factories
Fire Point has begun shipping its production model abroad and into NATO countries. In December 2025, ground was broken at Vojens in southern Denmark, next to Skrydstrup Air Base, where the Royal Danish Air Force keeps its F-35s. The plant, run by a Fire Point subsidiary, will produce solid rocket fuel, engine casings, and structural components, and will assemble rocket motors. It is the first Ukrainian defense-manufacturing site on the territory of a NATO member. Partial production is targeted for late 2026, full capacity for 2027.
In September 2025, Denmark temporarily suspended more than 20 laws and regulations, covering spatial planning, construction, energy, environmental protection, and pollution control, to fast-track the site as defense-critical. Copenhagen also set aside about 500 million kroner, almost $80 million, to accelerate Ukrainian arms production on its territory.
Germany may be next, with Diehl Defence reportedly in talks with Fire Point to open a Flamingo production line within the country, with Diehl offering a more advanced seeker than the one the missile currently uses. If it happens, it would be the first Ukrainian strategic strike weapon built inside a NATO member’s industrial base, and it would address the engine and electronics constraints that limit output in Ukraine.
Lessons for Europe
The Denmark case shows how fast a determined government can move. To get the plant built, Copenhagen suspended several regulations, and construction began within months of signing. A munitions plant of that kind would normally sit in European permitting queues for years. The lesson is not complicated. Europe’s problem in scaling air defense has stopped being the size of its budgets, which are rising quickly, and has become its inability to convert that money into production at wartime speed. Permitting, fragmented export rules between member states, and a shortage of skilled workers now do more to slow rearmament than any shortfall in funding. Denmark decided a Ukrainian rocket-fuel plant was worth bending its own rulebook for. Most of the continent has not yet made that kind of decision, and until governments are willing to treat their own bureaucracy as the obstacle, higher defense spending will keep arriving as announcements instead of missiles.
The second lesson pertains to the interceptor line. The economics of missile defense have turned against the defender: a Patriot PAC-3 round costs more than $5 million and often needs two or three shots to kill one ballistic missile, while the weapons it defends against cost a fraction of that. The war against Iran drained Western interceptor stocks and showed how thin they were to begin with. Fire Point’s answer is the FP-7.X, priced at around $700,000, roughly a seventh of a Patriot round. Building cheaper interceptors, instead of waiting years for more Patriots, is the only way Europe narrows the gap between what it can shoot down and what an adversary can launch.
Ukraine has also crossed from client to supplier, and Fire Point is the clearest case. The Denmark plant and the Freyja partnership both involve a Ukrainian company that supplies capability to European states instead of drawing it from them. Roughly half of European NATO equipment spending between 2022 and 2024 went to US suppliers, up from 28% in the three years before. Reversing that means building on European soil, and the quickest route is co-production with firms that already have working designs and combat experience. That is why Rheinmetall has tied itself to Destinus, the Netherlands-based maker of the Ruta cruise missile, which builds its own engines and does not depend on any US-sourced inputs.
The Destinus deal also shows how unusual Fire Point’s position is. Rheinmetall took the controlling stake in that venture and supplies the warheads and boosters, while Destinus provides the technology and sits underneath it. In Freyja the arrangement runs the other way. A three-year-old Ukrainian firm holds the system architecture, and Hensoldt, one of Germany’s established defense names, supplies the radar. That is the real departure from how European defense has worked. The continent’s own effort to close its deep-strike gap, the European Long-range Strike Approach, has spent two years acquiring missiles without building the integration and industrial depth that can convert them into a working system; four of its original members have already broken away to run national programs. Fire Point reverses the sequence. It integrates first and lets the platform follow, which is why an outsider now occupies the seat a European prime would once have held.
Fire Point grew the way it did because it operates under wartime industrial conditions. That produced speed no peacetime procurement can match, and Europe cannot manufacture the same urgency. What it can take from the company is an important lesson. Missiles can be built quickly and cheaply when a government decides to clear the obstacles in their way, and a firm with combat experience and a working design is worth more than an established name and a long production history. Europe has spent three years discovering that its budgets were never the real constraint. Fire Point is the proof of what becomes possible once that lesson is taken seriously, and the warning of how far behind the continent’s own industry has fallen for having learned it late.
