The Brains Behind Ukraine’s Pink Flamingo Cruise Missile

How does a young woman go from disdaining weapons to designing them? The defense industry is booming in Ukraine, and behind each new venture, Ms. Terekh says, “there is a very angry Ukrainian who has his very own personal story why he is angry.”

Hers begins with her family’s narrow escape from an occupied village west of Kyiv in the early days of the war. The family met at a home near the capital to decide what to do next, only to find themselves trapped under occupation. She recalls huddling in a basement wondering if they’d survive the night as explosions pounded the streets above.

The family decided to flee the heavy fighting, despite the lack of a humanitarian corridor—“I was under a huge illusion that since we are civilians, nobody was really interested in us”—but on the drive out, she witnessed the Russians shooting at civilian vehicles. Her car still has a hole from a Russian bullet. She later learned that the occupiers had brutalized and executed neighbors in the village she fled.

She felt compelled to do something for Ukraine and joined an effort to get Russia kicked out of the United Nations. What she now calls the “very naive idea” was that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation had unlawfully inherited its seat, with its veto on the Security Council. If only the global community would rectify this error, the council could authorize a peacekeeping operation to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

Predictably, the effort had no impact at all. Ms. Terekh discovered “how cynical the world can be” and concluded there’s “a price of delegating your own safety to somebody else.” Another disillusioned backer of the U.N. initiative founded Fire Point in 2022 and Ms. Terekh joined as a partner in June 2023.

Ukraine underwent a similar rude awakening to the nature of global power politics after it surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in the 1990s. Two decades later, Russia began its military aggression, undeterred by the security guarantees the U.S. and U.K. had offered Ukraine, never mind Moscow’s own promise. America’s support proved less than steadfast, Europe’s ineffectual. In 2022, after Russia tried to conquer the whole country, Ukraine started working toward military self-reliance.

Kyiv increasingly seeks Western aid and investment in its defense industry. In September Mr. Zelensky said “nearly 60% of the weapons we have” are Ukrainian-made. Unlike with donated Western weapons, Ukraine faces no external restraints on how it uses homemade munitions. Ms. Terekh says the Flamingo can hit a target more than 1,800 miles away with a payload of more than 2,500 pounds. That’s a longer range and a heavier payload than the U.S. Tomahawk.

Ukraine had played a key role in the Soviet defense industry, but civilian newcomers like Ms. Terekh are leading today’s rearmament. “It’s really not rocket science,” Ms. Terekh quips. “Humanity already knows how to make explosives and rockets.”

Early in the war, the Ukrainian Parliament removed regulatory obstacles for new defense companies, so “every garage received the possibility to try themselves and to do something,” Ms. Terekh says. Fire Point’s original team of 18 was comprised of “complete amateurs” in weapons-making, including aviation hobbyists and civilians with engineering, tech and business backgrounds. Ms. Terekh argues their unorthodox expertise brought a “fresh sparkle” to arms development.

Before the war, Ms. Terekh studied at the Kyiv National University of Civil Engineering and Architecture but dropped out after three years to start a business making small architectural demo sculptures for property developers. Her passion was the “post-Soviet architectural dilemma”: Ukraine’s urban spaces were designed so people would move through them “without really enjoying the path.” She soon found a niche working with property developers and volunteers to build attractive outdoor spaces. She learned a lot about high-precision concrete, including the chemistry, equipment, mixing process and molding required to make urban benches, lighting and facade paneling.

That experience came in handy as Fire Point built drone and missile wings from molds. The classic vacuum-infusion process took about a week, but Ms. Terekh had “a pretty dull idea” about how to expedite the process. It worked and now takes mere hours. Breakthroughs like this matter as Fire Point seeks to ramp up weapons production. Consider its FP-1 attack drone, created in 2023, which has a payload of more than 130 pounds and a range of nearly 870 miles. This year, the company will produce roughly 20,000 of them, up from about 200 in 2023, she says.

Ms. Terekh has also drawn on her project-management experience. Fire Point couldn’t buy the engines it needed to scale up production of drones and missiles, so it decided to make them. Ms. Terekh oversaw a team of engineers as they experimented with making their own molds, developing appropriate alloys, perfecting the chemical-coating process and more. Fire Point now makes 80 of 82 engine components. And as the entrepreneurial engineers tinkered, they found ways to save money while also extending their weapons’ range by nearly 375 miles.

In the summer of 2024 Fire Point focused on developing a cruise missile. “We approach it just as a bigger drone,” Ms. Terekh says. “So of course some things are much more complicated. Everything else is just physics, which is simulatable, calculable and doable.” From conception to delivery, the process took about nine months.

During Fire Point’s early days, someone painted a solid rocket booster prototype Barbie pink as a joke. Later, during testing, Fire Point needed to paint one of its missiles a bright color so the staff could locate and analyze debris afterward. They were out of orange paint, but pink was available—hence the Flamingo. Though missiles used in strikes are colored inconspicuously.

On the day of the Flamingo’s final test before securing government approval for use, the mood was tense at Fire Point. Ms. Terekh and her colleagues wanted their missile to succeed, but such tests are also prime targets for Russian missile attacks. “We were about to launch—like tick-tock,” when a shout pierced the air. Someone had found a litter of abandoned puppies in a box in the danger zone of the testing field. A colleague scooped them into a car. The test proceeded and the Flamingo passed. Fire Point staffers adopted some of the puppies, and two are now guard dogs in the weapons factory.

Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against Russian targets is gaining momentum, and the targets are “related either to the Russian war economy or Russian war machinery,” says   Yuriy Sak, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense and Strategic Industries ministries. The top military commander, Gen.   Oleksandr Syrskyi, told the Ukrainian press in late September that Kyiv had conducted 85 successful strikes against targets within Russia in less than two months. Ms. Terekh says the majority of them involved Fire Point platforms.

In August Ukraine used the Flamingo to hit a military target in occupied Crimea—“a good mission despite the fact it was short-range,” Ms. Terekh says. She says there have been other uses of the missile, which she isn’t at liberty to discuss. Production of the Ukrainian cruise missile is on track to reach about 200 a month by the end of the year, and Ms. Terekh expects to make a few thousand in 2026.

In late October the head of the Security Service of Ukraine   said   Kyiv had conducted nearly 160 successful strikes on Russian oil production and refining facilities so far this year. In August and September, Ukraine hit 16 of Russia’s approximately 38 operational oil refineries, some of them multiple times, says   John Hardie   of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Kyiv has also targeted export and pumping facilities.

Energy sales fund Mr. Putin’s war machine. As Mr. Sak says, “if you look at how President Zelensky now speaks about our deep-strike capability, he says that these are the best sanctions, the sanctions that have instant impact.”

Russian state statistics are unreliable, but even they show recent increases in gasoline prices. In October Russia’s national automobile union proposed a price cap at stations across the country. The Kremlin recently announced a ban on gasoline exports through the end of the year.

Russia has ramped up massive combined drone and missile strikes on cities deep inside Ukraine, and Kyiv has only a limited supply of interceptors. So another priority of its deep-strike campaign has been to hit Russian weapons-production facilities and their suppliers. Fifty-two of the 85 recent strikes on Russia hit “defense-industrial complex targets: facilities that manufacture weapons, ammunition, warheads, engines, rocket fuel, drones—everything used daily against us,” Gen. Syrskyi told the Ukrainian press.

Like Ukraine, Russia lacks sufficient air defenses to guard everything important. As Ukraine ramps up deep strikes, “you have front-line formations you need to protect and rear items that you need to protect,” says   Mykola Bielieskov   of the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies. “There is no simple choice.” After each strike, Ukrainian industry and military experts review the results and make tweaks to strain Russian air defenses and hit more targets next time.

Ukraine’s nascent weapons companies are high-priority targets for Russia, and Moscow’s strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure can hinder its energy-intensive defense industry. But there’s an opportunity for Europe to help: In September Copenhagen announced that Fire Point would set up operations near the Danish town of Vojens to make solid rocket propellants for the Flamingo and other projects—a sanctuary for Ukraine, for once. Given her high profile, Ms. Terekh says she’s been warned that the Russians may personally target her. Her escape from Russian occupation underpins her response: Russians “want to kill every Ukrainian. Each of us. Until the last one.”

Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign won’t be the silver (or pink) bullet to end the war. But as Kyiv creates compounding dilemmas for Russia, it strengthens its leverage for peace talks.

Fire Point’s executives have a sense of humor about their work. Last February President Trump notoriously told Mr. Zelensky that “you don’t have the cards right now.” Ms. Terekh slips me some Fire Point stickers, including one showing an ace of spades with a flamingo coyly slipping its leg over a pink missile.

Ukrainian defense companies like hers have improved their country’s hand. If the U.S. were to cut off support, Ukraine would struggle and casualties would increase. But military experts say that domestic production now suffices to ensure the front line wouldn’t imminently collapse.

In such a scenario Ukraine’s most immediate crisis would be the lack of U.S. Patriot missiles, the only means of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles. Developing an alternative is a priority for Fire Point, and Ms. Terekh says the effort is under way in cooperation with other European and Ukrainian companies. Meanwhile Fire Point is “on the finish line with development of our own Ukrainian ballistic missiles,” she says. Her personal criteria for victory is to scare the Russians enough that they won’t attack again: “I want this fear to be encrypted in their DNA for as many generations as possible.”