Ukraine has tested a new surface-to-air missile designed as a
cheaper, mass-producible alternative to the shortage-plagued US Patriot system.
Kyiv has struggled to secure enough western interceptors to protect
its cities from constant Russian missile and drone attacks, such as a massive raid last week which killed at least 22 people across Ukraine.
Ukrainian arms maker Fire Point said it carried out the first flight test of its FP-7.x anti-missile interceptor last week, which co-founder Denys Shtilierman labelled “pretty successful” in an interview with the FT.
Fire Point says FP-7.x is intended to counter Russian ballistic missile and drone threats at a fraction of the cost of existing western systems such as Lockheed Martin’s Patriot and the Franco-Italian SAMP-T and could eventually be produced in far larger numbers.
Mass production of the missile could begin in August, Shtilierman said, pending the delivery of an infrared seeker for guidance, which Fire Point was hoping to source from Germany’s Diehl Defence. The completed missiles would be ready by 2027, he said.
The rest of the air defence system — known as Freyja — including radars
used to detect and target aircraft, and the command and control system
will come from European partners.
Fire Point declined to confirm or deny who it was working with, but European and Ukrainian officials say Fire Point has had discussions with Germany’s Hensoldt and Thales for radar, Italy’s Leonardo for tracking and target acquisition radar, and Norway’s Kongsberg for command and control technology.
“Finishing this depends on the speed of our western partners and when
they start moving,” he said.
US defence conglomerate Lockheed Martin produces hundreds of
interceptors a year for the Patriot system but most of the production
has gone to replacing stocks used up in the war with Iran.
Ukrainian experts say that the nightly drumbeat of Russian air attacks, as well as the slow replacement of the PAC-2 and PAC-3 missiles, has dented confidence in the Patriot system.
“Can we count on Patriots? I don’t think we can any more,” said Dmytro
Kuleba, former foreign minister of Ukraine. “The overall industrial capacity of America, given the latest exposure in Iran, demonstrates that America will keep the best for itself.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also complained about fewer Patriot deliveries “because of the war in the Middle East” saying: “Whatever we could, we replaced with our own domestic production, but we still cannot replace PAC-3.
“We are already working with several countries . . . on the development of European anti-ballistic capabilities,” said Zelenskyy in apparent reference to Freyja.
Shtilierman said his interceptor cost $700,000, compared with $3.8mn per missile for the Patriot PAC-3, according to 2026 budget estimates published by the US Army. Fire Point could manufacture three per day starting in August that could be stored until the seeker could be attached, he added.
The fast pace of manufacturing in Ukraine compared with western countries has to a large part been made possible by the war economy, which fast-tracks military production.
“Today we have probably the least bureaucratic approach to the
production of anything in aerospace,” said Shtilierman.
The most difficult part of developing anti-ballistic missiles, according to defence consultant Marc Lange, is that they are hard to test. “Only lots of operational use and engineering work can help break this curse,” he said.
“On the other hand, Ukraine has the gift and the curse of constant Russian ballistic missile attacks, which is one factor that could help compress the timeline.”
Fire Point was met with scepticism last year when it announced it would build cheap cruise missiles. But it has had recent successes with its FP-1 long-range drone targeting Russian refineries and a warship near St Petersburg.
The middle-range FP-2 variant is also used extensively by Ukrainian forces to hammer Russian logistical routes in Moscow-held Ukrainian regions.
Experts say the missiles, which are not particularly stealthy, are able to take advantage of sparse radar coverage in Russia because of the country’s size. “Fire Point has proven that it can pull a rabbit out of a hat more than once,” said Lange.
Shtilierman said the altitude of the FP-7.x was 25km, similar to the
Patriot, and it was designed, like the PAC-3, to be fast enough to intercept
ballistic missiles.
Unlike the Patriot, which is guided by advanced ground-based targeting radar, the FP-7.x is radar-guided but uses a heat-seeking seeker for the “last mile” according to a Fire Point representative. Heat-seeking is generally held to be less effective than radar targeting because of the availability of spoofing and countermeasures.
Tom Karako, a missile defence expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the FP-7.x could add to
Ukraine’s air defence arsenal, which includes old Soviet systems, US
Hawk missiles and modern German IRIS-T interceptors. But he added that the Freyja system was unlikely to be a full substitute for more advanced
systems such as the Patriot.
“When you’ve got that full spectrum of threats, you need a lot of
different tools,” Karako said. “The Patriot is a very exquisite capability, and so maybe ‘supplements’ may be a better formulation than ‘substitute’.”
Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin
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