FirePoint CTO: We can scale up production if funding is available

With sufficient funding, Ukrainian arms manufacturers — including the defense company Fire Point, which produces the long-range Flamingo missiles — are capable of scaling up production. However, partners need to place greater trust in young Ukrainian companies that currently have the most relevant experience in this field.

This was stated by Fire Point’s Chief Technology Officer, Iryna Terekh, in a comment to Ukrinform.

“We can do anything if there is funding for it. Most Ukrainian manufacturers have learned, already at the design stage, to develop solutions that can be scaled in the future. This is extremely important, because there is an incredible number of excellent developments that cannot be mass-produced on a large scale,” Terekh said. She clarified that the priority is to scale production specifically in Ukraine, and that support from European partners is critically important in this regard. Currently, the so-called “Danish model” is widely discussed, but other models are also possible; however, the initiative lies primarily with European countries. Ukraine remains very open to various forms of cooperation that will ultimately strengthen the defense capability of the European continent.

At the same time, the company’s CTO acknowledged that the current level of bureaucracy in the European defense industry is so high that, in most cases, such cooperation is “less interesting than interesting” for companies.

“Accordingly, for the Ukrainian defense industry to be able to focus on what it does best — namely, producing relevant weapons that no one else in the world can manufacture — the bureaucratic burden must be lifted through simplification and through the creation of special models that enable such cooperation,” Terekh said.

She believes that partners should stop treating young Ukrainian companies with distrust and should take the risk of working with them. Terekh illustrated this with a simple example: “If someone has a gun to your head and suddenly someone appears who can save you from that situation, I don’t think you will care very much about how old that person is or what experience they have.”

“Today, many young Ukrainian companies have more up-to-date combat experience than some long-established giants. They are not playing in the same league, not because someone is better or worse, but because the experience is different. The experience of Ukrainian companies is the most relevant to today’s war, not the previous one, not the one before that, but to what is happening right now,” Terekh emphasized.

Responding to claims about the Flamingo missile’s similarity to specific foreign designs, she explained that even in terms of intellectual property law, to register a know-how, it must differ by at least 30 percent from a prior comparable product. “If you look at the defense industry today, you will not find any pure know-how there. The know-how lies in systems and approaches, including the service system, the training system, the support system, and the system of continuous cycles and innovation. This matters far more than the uniqueness of any single technical unit taken in isolation. Of course, we drew inspiration from existing developments to shorten development time. But the point is not which navigation system we install; the point is that this navigation system will always be updated to meet the most modern requirements,” Iryna Terekh stated.

As reported, the General Staff confirmed that the use of the latest Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo missile-drones against the enemy began in May 2025.