Ukraine has revealed, what President Zelensky called, the most successful missile the country has so far.
Ukraine’s new Flamingo FP-5 cruise missile has a range of 3,000kms (or 1,864 miles), according to the Ukrainian president. This means it can strike all of Russia’s European cities, including Moscow, from Ukraine. Russia’s oil industry will also be severely exposed to the new missile.
Flamingo’s disclosed speed is 950kms per hour (or 590 miles) and it can carry a one ton warhead.
“We did not want to go public with this one, but it seems to be the right time,” Iryna Terekh, CEO of Fire Point, the missile’s manufacturer, said in an interview with POLITICO.
“We came up with it pretty fast. It took less than nine months to develop it from an idea to its first successful tests on the battlefield. I will not tell you about its exact speed, but I can say it’s faster than all the other missiles we currently have,” she added.
Flamingo – named so after its pink tip that houses the warhead – is entirely produced by Ukraine, Terekh said. Ukraine has been promoting its defense industry
In a meeting with journalists on August 20, Zelensky said that by December, Ukraine will have more Flamingos. “And by the end of December or in January-February, mass production should begin. We need to look at success in testing, we need to look at the funding of this program,” he added.
According to Terekh, the missile is now at serial production, a production stage before mass production, and about 200 Flamingos are currently produced a month.
Fire Point is still exploring the missile’s full capabilities, the company’s CEO said.
Detailed footage of the launch and flight of the new Ukrainian cruise missile FP-5 "Flamingo" https://t.co/2q7utbgkqk pic.twitter.com/xYxQUXLvjX
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 22, 2025
The Flamingo reveals come close at the heels of Zelensky’s meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and European and NATO leaders at the White House and a bilateral meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week.
Despite initial hopes for a ceasefire and peace settlement to the war, which has been raging for 3.5 years, negotiations seem to be again at a standstill over disagreements regarding security guarantees to Ukraine: Kyiv wants robust guarantees to prevent Russia from resuming its attack in the future should peace be agreed, something that Moscow opposes.
On August 21, a day after Zelensky’s Flamingo reveals, President Trump wrote on Truth Social, a social media platform, that “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders [sic] country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense.”
He lambasted the Biden Administration for not letting Ukraine, “fight back, only defend” and added, “Interesting times ahead!!!”
Ukraine wants to produce its own long-range missiles. The country is currently developing capabilities for the mass production of its Sapsan ballistic missile, Zelensky had said in June this year. It also produces the Neptune, another ballistic missile, which has seen regular use, per Ukraine’s minister for strategic industries.
Russia has repeatedly used long-range missiles to strike Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. So far, Ukraine has mostly used long-range or special-operations-enabled drones to strike targets deep in Russian territory; with Flamingo, this may soon change.
Feature Image: Ukraine’s Flamingo FP-5 cruise missile. (Fire Point)
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