DEEP DIVE – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky calls it “our most successful missile.” One expert says it’s "Ukraine’s strongest security guarantee.” And former CIA Director and Cipher Brief expert Gen. David Petraeus says it has the potential to be “a game changer” in the war against Russia.

They are talking about the FP-5 Flamingo, a ground-launched, subsonic, made-in-Ukraine cruise missile, built to hit targets deep in Russian territory.

Not since the first salvos of Russia’s 2022 invasion has Ukraine’s defense industry sounded so enthusiastic about a weapon manufactured on its soil. The successes of Ukrainian defense technology are well known; as The Cipher Brief reported last month, the country is now widely believed to have the world’s most innovative defense sector. Its drone technology in particular continues to earn rave reviews from experts and western defense companies alike.

But the Flamingo is something different – a missile with a reported range of 1800 miles and the ability to carry more than 2,000 pounds of munitions, meaning that in one strike it could cause greater damage than even a swarm of drones. Compared to the top-class American Tomahawk cruise missile, the Flamingo is believed to be less accurate but with a similar range and a much heavier payload. And because it is manufactured in Ukraine, the Flamingo can be launched against Russian targets without Western-imposed restrictions.

“The Flamingo may actually be a game changer,” Gen. Petraeus said at the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference last month. “You add that capability to what Ukraine has already done,” he said, referring to the recent drone campaign against Russia’s oil sector, “and [the Flamingo] will extend this dramatically.”

Zelensky said last month that the Flamingos had carried out their first missions, including a three-missile attack on a Russian security base in northern Crimea. Last week, Ukraine’s General Staff said it had used Flamingos as part of a strike that targeted “several dozen” military and infrastructure sites inside Russia and in occupied Crimea.

The Flamingo’s manufacturer, the Ukrainian firm Fire Point, claims to be producing between 1-2 missiles per day, with plans to scale to 7 per day by year’s end, for a 2026 projected total of more than 2,500. "By December we’ll have many more of them,” Zelensky told reporters in August. “And by the end of December or in January–February, mass production should begin."

Experts say every one of those missiles will dwarf the power of a drone weapon.

“With the drone-strike campaign, you have the challenge that they mostly carry fairly small warheads,” John Hardie, Deputy Director of the Russia program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told The Cipher Brief. “The damage is far less than you could do with a one-time warhead that’s carried by the Flamingo.”

All of which raises the question: Might the Flamingo change the course of the war?

How the Flamingo was born

Even by the lofty standards of Ukraine’s recent defense-tech achievements, the Flamingo’s origin story is an inspiring one. And it dates to the last days of the Cold War.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Ukraine agreed to give up not only its nuclear weapons but also its considerable arsenal of Kh-55 cruise missiles. And after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders pressed constantly – and with mixed success – for western weaponry and security guarantees, they also began turbocharging their domestic defense industry.

“Ukrainians were authors of the Soviet space program and rocket program,” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, told The Cipher Brief. “When you have a lot of experience and when your people are smart enough, then the result is obvious. You have technologies which other countries respect.”

For more than three years, however, Ukraine remained largely dependent on Western countries for high-end, long-range strike capabilities. That led to the creation of a made-in-Ukraine cruise missile program.

The result is the FP-5 Flamingo, developed by Fire Point, a former casting agency that spun itself into a defense firm in the summer of 2022. In 2023, Fire Point produced its first FP-1 attack drones, ultimately turning out 200 FP-1s that year; this year the figure is expected to hit 20,000. Its cruise missile project has moved at a similar warp speed: in August, less than a year after it began work on the cruise missile, the company was showing off the prototype; soon after that, the first Flamingos were flying.

“We came up with it pretty fast,” Iryna Terekh, the company's 33-year-old Chief Technical Officer, told Politico. “It took less than nine months to develop it from an idea to its first successful tests on the battlefield.”

Terekh and other Ukrainian defense entrepreneurs speak often about how the Russian invasion has motivated their work – what Goncharenko calls “the unfortunate inspiration of war.” Terekh fled a Russian-occupied village near Kyiv in the early days of the war, and says her car still has a hole from a Russian bullet. She joined FirePoint as a partner in June 2023.

Ralph Goff, a former Senior Intelligence Executive at the CIA, calls the Flamingo production story “combat Darwinism at its best.”

“If the West isn't going to give them the long-range weaponry that they want to carry out their strategic attacks, they'll develop them themselves,” Goff told the October Cipher Brief conference. The Flamingo, he said, “is a serious piece of offensive weaponry.”

As for the missile’s unusual name, that traces to an in-house story at Fire Point, about the day when someone painted a solid rocket booster prototype pink, in a nod to the women involved in the male-dominated world of weapons production. Later, when the missiles were ready for testing, the company needed a bright color to help locate post-launch debris. Pink paint was available – and that led to the Flamingo moniker. The Pink has gone – missiles used in actual strikes are colored less conspicuously – but “Flamingo” stuck.

“You don’t need a scary name for a missile that can fly 3,000 kilometers," Terekh said. "The main goal is for a missile to be effective.”

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Reality check

If Fire Point’s claims are borne out, the Flamingo will have a reach and power on par with western cruise missiles, and an arsenal to match any European nation’s other than Russia.

Experts warn that behind that “If” lie multiple concerns – most of them due to the fact that there has been minimal independent verification of the company’s claims.

“In the defense industry, it’s easier to make statements than to actually implement them,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko said of the Flamingo’s potential, speaking to Radio NV last month.

One issue involves accuracy, which experts say Fire Point had to sacrifice to a degree in its push for a low-cost, fast-to-market weapon. In the Crimea strike, one missile reportedly landed some 100 meters from its target.

“Because it's low-cost, you kind of skimp on some of the more high-end features you might see in a more exquisite missile, guidance and accuracy being one of them,” Hardie said. “It's a relatively inaccurate missile at least by modern standards.” But he added that if the pace of manufacturing ultimately yields the high numbers Fire Point has promised, then “that tradeoff [high volume for accuracy] makes sense.”

Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and analyst for RPolitik, has studied the Flamingo project since its early days. He doubts that Fire Point can reach its production goals.

“The Flamingo is real, but the production capacity is overstated, at least so far,” Jarabik told The Cipher Brief. He noted that an earlier Ukrainian-made missile, the Neptune, has yet to reach its promised scale, and that for all its defense-sector successes, Ukraine must contend with wartime supply-chain issues that would bedevil any weapons manufacturers. He and Hardie said that scaling to hundreds of Flamingos per month will require consistent supplies of everything from engines to warheads to electronics for guidance systems.

“I'm a little skeptical, but it's possible the Ukrainians will get there,” Hardie said, and Gen. Petraeus said that the Ukrainians “really need to double down” on the pace of the Flamingo manufacturing. “They're trying to get that into full production.”

Fire Point must do so while Russia targets Ukraine’s young defense companies as well as the country’s energy infrastructure. The latter is critical, given the defense sector’s high demand for energy. For one piece of the Flamingo supply chain, the company has already found a workaround: in September, Fire Point announced that Denmark had agreed to produce fuel for the Flamingo, effectively removing a key production facility from the war zone. The announcement provoked a warning from the Kremlin, which called the Danish plans “hostile.”

That response raises the question of Russian retaliation – a concern that has accompanied the delivery of virtually every new weapons system to the Ukrainian side. Some experts fear that any successful, high-impact Flamingo strike against Russia, carried out with help from Western intelligence – the destruction of a weapons factory deep in Russian territory, for example – would risk a NATO-Russia fight that the West has been desperate to avoid. Others doubt that Vladimir Putin has any interest – at least not in the current moment – in any escalation that might lead to conflict with the West.

“The Russians have been consistently more bark than bite,” Hardie said. “They know that attacking a NATO country in an overt military way – not the sort of gray-zone, below-the-threshold-of-war stuff they've been doing, but an overt military missile strike – that's an act of war. And Putin doesn't want any part of a direct conventional fight with the United States and NATO allies.”

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What to watch for

Even analysts who are skeptical about the Flamingo’s future note that it would take only a few successful strikes to inflict severe damage, and that if Fire Point can get anywhere close to its 2500-missile-per-year pledge for 2026, the battlefield impact could be profound. Beyond the Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities the Ukrainians have attacked lately, the Flamingo will put more military targets in range as well. The holy grail might be the joint Russia-Iran manufacturing facility in Tatarstan that is turning out the deadly Shahed drones, at a scale that the Ukrainians must envy.

Experts say that with hundreds of Flamingos at the ready, Ukraine might achieve what Jarabik refers to as “mass saturation,” an ability to bring a heavy and varied drone-and-missile threat to military and energy targets across all of European Russia.

“If you're Ukraine,” Hardie said, “you'd like to be able to combine these missiles and drones into a complex strike package much as the Russians are currently doing, and keep the Russian air defense on its toes.”

“The Flamingo is heavy, and it’s also relatively easy to shoot down,” Jarabik said. “And so they will need mass saturation – a lot of these missiles, but with drones or other weapons too, to get through to the targets. They're going to have to produce enough that they can have a sustained impact, …and I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon.”

Then Jarabik added: “All that said, you have to acknowledge Ukraine’s innovation and skill. And I think [the Flamingo] is a big thing. Absolutely.”

As for the accuracy concerns, Ukrainian officials noted that while one of the Flamingos fired at Crimea did miss its mark, the two others leveled a barracks and brought a “massive destructive power,” with craters measuring 15 meters in diameter.

No one is touting the Flamingo as a replacement for the array of Western missiles that have been delivered to Kyiv. The Ukrainians will still covet the German Taurus, and the British-French Storm Shadow/Scalp cruise missiles, which are more accurate, though they come with conditions attached to their use. The diversity and volume of weapons systems, experts say, are what could make a real difference. And the Flamingo adds a powerful new element to the Ukrainian arsenal.

“No one system or weapon is going to be the decisive game changer,” Hardie said. “I don't think there's any such thing as a wonder weapon. That being said, for a supporter of Ukraine, it's really encouraging to see Ukraine being able to move out on its own more in terms of long-range strike capabilities. They are taking these steps forward and really taking it to the Russians right now with this campaign against energy infrastructure. That's been impressive to see and I think it kind of augurs more to come. So if I were the Russians, I would be worried about that.”

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DEEP DIVE – By any traditional definition, the city of Ryazan doesn’t belong on a list of battlegrounds in the Ukraine war. There are no Ukrainian soldiers or tanks deployed there, and it’s in western Russia, roughly 600 miles from the active front lines of Pokrovsk or Kupiansk.

But residents and officials in Ryazan – population 550,000 – wouldn’t be surprised to find their city on such a list. Ukraine has attacked Ryazan at least a half dozen times, as part of an escalating drone-and-missile campaign against Russia’s oil sector. Most recently, an oil refinery in Ryazan – Russia’s fourth-largest – was forced to shut down after an Oct. 23 attack by Ukrainian drones.

Ryazan is hardly alone.

Lt. Gen. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, said last week that Ukraine has carried out more than 160 successful attacks on Russian refineries and other energy targets this year; an Open Source Centre investigation identified more than 90 strikes between Aug. 2 and Oct. 14. In the last week alone, Ukraine has struck an oil terminal and tanker in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse; energy facilities in Russia's Oryol, Vladimir, and Yaroslavl regions; and the Koltsevoy, or “ring,” pipeline, which links refineries in Moscow, Ryazan, and Nizhny Novgorod, and supplies fuel to the Russian military. Earlier strikes damaged one of Russia's biggest oil refineries near St. Petersburg, and perhaps most impressive – from the Ukrainian point of view – the campaign has reached as far as the Siberian city of Tyumen, some 1200 miles east of Moscow.

Stretching the conventional notion of front lines is clearly part of the Ukrainian strategy; the strikes have forced the Kremlin to worry about drone and missile attacks across a broad swath of Russian territory. But the main aim is to hurt the Russian oil sector – the country’s richest revenue source, and a key reason why the Kremlin has been able to maintain the funding of its war machine.

“Ukraine’s theory of victory now includes destroying Russia’s energy sector,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief. “They’ve developed capabilities that can reach great distances with precision, exposing Russia’s vulnerability – its inability to protect critical infrastructure across its vast landscape.”

Last week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to intensify the pace and scope of the campaign. “We must work every day to weaken the Russians. Their money for the war comes from oil refining,” Zelensky said in an Oct. 27 address to the nation. “The most effective sanctions - the ones that work the fastest - are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.”

Zelensky also noted that 90 percent of the strikes have been carried out by Ukrainian-made drones and missiles – a not-so-subtle message to Europe and the U.S.: get us more of your long-range weapons, and we can help bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

“It’s very impressive,” said Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and analyst for RPolitik, said of Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian energy sector. In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Jarabik said the attacks have “had an impact in terms of getting headlines, making the Russian war effort more expensive, and creating shortages so the Russian people feel the pain of the war.”

That’s also the aim of the recent U.S. sanctions against energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil, the first American economic penalties imposed on Russia since Donald Trump returned to office. The Treasury Department said the sanctions would “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector and degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine.”

While Ukrainian officials have welcomed the sanctions, they have also said that their drone and missile attacks pack a more powerful punch.

“Our strikes have already had more impact than sanctions,” Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of Military Intelligence, said on Telegram following last week’s spate of attacks.

For their part, Putin and other Russian officials have downplayed the impact of the strikes while at the same time warning that they are dangerously escalatory. The Kremlin has also said that neither the attacks nor the sanctions will move them to change course in the war.

Experts say both sides may be right – that in the short term, the Kremlin can probably ride out the impact of the Ukrainian campaign, but that Russia may feel significant pain if the sanctions are enforced and the oil sector strikes continue.

“Russia’s oil refineries are a bit like a man who is being repeatedly punched,” Sergey Vakulenko, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a recent assessment for Carnegie Politika. “He will not die from one punch, or even half a dozen punches. But it becomes harder and harder for him to recover after each subsequent blow. Although no single punch is fatal, he could end up being beaten to death.”

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Assessing the damage

To date, the Ukrainian strikes have hit 21 of Russia's 38 large oil refineries, according to the BBC, and several have been struck more than once. Roughly 20% of the nation’s refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed, and last month the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that Russia's revenues from crude oil and refined products had fallen to their lowest level in a decade – excluding the period immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak.

"Persistent attacks on Russian energy infrastructure have cut Russian crude processing by an estimated 500,000 barrels per day, resulting in domestic fuel shortages and lower product exports," the IEA said. In an accompanying forecast, the agency said that if the sanctions remain in place and the attacks continue – even without Zelensky’s promised scaling-up of their cadence – the impact to Russia’s refining would stretch to at least mid-2026.

Beyond the macroeconomic impact, the Ukrainian campaign has also been felt by Russian citizens, in the form of higher fuel prices and – in some regions – shortages and long lines for gas.

“The economic impact of strikes against Russian energy infrastructure is beginning to be felt outside of Moscow, as Russia diverts available energy from the regions to keep Moscow supplied,” Rob Dannenberg, a former chief of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division, wrote last week in The Cipher Brief. “There are shortages and energy price hikes that the Kremlin can no longer conceal.”

And in a broader reflection of Russia’s economic woes, this week the central bank downgraded the country’s growth forecast. Experts say the sanctions and Ukrainian strikes are a big part of the problem for Moscow.

“Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are strategically meaningful and increasingly so,” Jacek Siewiera, a former head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, told The Cipher Brief. He said the strikes are serving three strategic functions: forcing Russia to divert efforts to rear-area defense; raising the overall cost of war by creating new logistical costs inside Russia; and a less tangible, more symbolic impact.

“These attacks send a message to Moscow and its economy that Ukraine – and its backers – can reach deep,” Siewiera said. “That has symbolic as well as material value.”

What comes next

Might the Ukrainian campaign alter the course of the war? Experts are divided on the question.

On the one hand, dozens of Russian oil sector targets are now within reach of Ukrainian missiles and drones – and it’s clear that Zelensky’s vow to expand and intensify the campaign is underway. An already-bruised industry in Russia is surely girding for more punishment.

But several experts said that in order to sustain the tempo and volume of the attacks, Ukraine will need help from the West or a significant boost to its own capabilities.

“Ukraine has made impressive inroads but it’s not yet clear whether the strikes will fundamentally degrade Russia’s war-fighting capacity,” Siewiera said. He and others echoed Zelensky’s point – that the West should support Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities to boost the impact of the current attacks, and improve the odds that they will effect change in Moscow. Until then, Siewiera said, it’s unlikely that the campaign can deliver “a knockout blow.”

Jarabik agreed, noting that Ukrainian drones typically carry payloads of only 50-60 kilograms (roughly 110-130 pounds); long-range missile systems can inflict far greater damage. He and others said that much will depend on the success of the Ukrainian-made Flamingo missile – which has been touted as a homegrown alternative to western long-range weapons. Officials say the Flamingo is now operational, and that it can carry more than 1,000 kilos (2000+ pounds), with a range of roughly 1800 miles.

“I think we are going to see the Ukrainian strikes increasing,” Jarabik said. “The big question here is whether Ukrainians are going to have the missile capabilities to scale the attack.” At the current rate, he said, Ukraine cannot compel the Kremlin to alter its approach. “So far, neither the sanctions nor this (campaign of strikes) is actually enough to bring the end of the war. Russia has the means to continue.”

All those interviewed for this piece agreed that the success of the Ukrainian campaign will depend on whether Ukraine can hit more targets, more frequently, and with heavier payloads.

“As Ukraine continues to improve its long-range precision strike capability – and if the West adds its own weapons to Ukraine’s arsenal – the impact is going to increase significantly,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. And that, he said, “could lead to a successful outcome for Ukraine.”

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