Security analysts have differing takes on Ukraine’s new Flamingo missile, but most have already predicted more and bigger explosions well inside Russia.

Oct. 22, 2025

In 1994, Ukraine signed the now-notorious Budapest Memorandum – a document legalizing Kyiv’s abandonment of nuclear weapons in exchange for Kremlin promises to respect Ukrainian national sovereignty, not to use force against Ukraine and to respect Ukraine’s borders.

A somewhat less well-known but equally important condition of that deal – cut primarily because neither the Kremlin nor the White House wanted Ukraine to keep owning what at the time was the world’s third-biggest nuclear arsenal – was that Ukraine should eliminate the delivery systems for its nuclear warheads: 1,080 air-launched cruise missiles.

Ukraine kept its word. Russia did not.

Thirty years after Budapest was signed for the sake of peace and nuclear disarmament, 14 years into Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, and after more than three years of renewed Russian invasion and massed, conventional war, modern Ukraine is rebuilding its long-range, precision-guided cruise missile arsenal.

The first test weapons have already been fired in combat.

According to Kyiv official statements, the missiles will soon be in mass production, and by mid-2026, Ukraine will have amassed a stockpile of weapons capable of hitting practically anything within 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) inside Russia with a half-ton conventional explosive warhead.

The replacement for the Kh-55 cruise missiles given up by Ukraine in the 1990s (Russia actually even fired a few back at Ukraine in 2022), per statements by Ukrainian President Zelensky and his staff, is called the Flamingo missile. (During development, the paint on a test copy reportedly accidentally turned pink. The paint issue was addressed, but the nickname stuck.)

If official Kyiv claims about the low-flying missile are true, then – even if Ukraine’s Flamingo arsenal isn’t tipped with nuclear warheads – the security balance of Europe and Russia could shift towards greater instability and expanded war, some security analysts say.

Weighing in at a beefy six tons, the 6-meter-long (20-foot-long), 1-meter-diameter (3-foot-diameter) Flamingo per reported specs uses a jet engine to transport 430-550 kilograms (948-1,213 pounds) of high explosives to a target at close to the speed of sound. The missile guides itself to target using GPS and internal navigation and should be able to strike within 15 meters (49 feet) or less of its aiming point – not world-class accuracy, but by Ukrainian standards more than precise enough to set an oil refinery on fire. Kyiv appears to have tested the Flamingo twice and possibly three times. The best-documented strike was a three-missile salvo fired at a Russian secret police base in Crimea in August – satellite images showed two hits leveling a barracks and some hovercraft on a beach and a massive crater was about 100 meters (328 feet) from the probable target. Compared to the top-of-the-line US-made Tomahawk cruise missile, the Flamingo is less accurate but carries a warhead almost three times bigger.

“One thing the Ukrainians always tell us is they’ve got the range to hit targets (in Russia) they haven’t got the punch. They say their drones’ warheads aren’t powerful enough. This (the Flamingo missile) marries the range and punch,” said Australian Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Mick Ryan, Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute, in comments to Kyiv Post.

“The Flamingo missile is fairly easy to deal with for a well-organized layered air defense system. But the thing is, Russia does not have a well-organized layered air defense,” said Anders Puck Nielsen, an analyst at the Royal Danish Defense College. “The range of the missile means that the number of potential targets is impossible for Russia to guard sufficiently. It’s also evident that Russia suffers from the attrition of air defense systems. So even if the Flamingo missile is large and easy to detect, it might still be a big headache for the Russians.

Probably the most eye-popping Kyiv Flamingo claim is neither accuracy nor destructive power, but that the weapons are already assembled or soon to be. Per statements by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the manufacturer Fire Point, secret facilities are currently already pumping out one to two missiles a day at a price of about $500,000 a weapon, 100 missiles are ready-to-fire and awaiting missions, and by early 2026, Flamingos will be filling Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) magazines at a rate of seven missiles daily. That production pace, if maintained, would allow Ukraine to reach the level of the long-range cruise missile arsenal it voluntarily abandoned in the 1990s (even while expending two or three dozen Flamingos in future combat testing) by May or latest July 2026. At that point in time, Ukraine would become, after Russia, the owner of Europe’s most powerful cruise missile force, with as many long-range cruise missiles as France and Great Britain combined.

Some observers have suggested the Zelensky administration and Fire Point are talking up the military-strategic version of vaporware, and that Ukraine lacks the financing and capacity to produce so many advanced weapons so quickly.

“I already have extensive experience serving in the army and the intelligence services, and when I’m already involved in the defense industry, it’s easier to make statements than to actually implement them,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko in comments reported by Radio NV on Monday.

The manufacturer says cheap production of a viable weapon is not just possible but in progress right now, thanks to the use of lightweight carbon-fiber composites in manufacturing, and the installation of an engine called the Ivchenko-Progress AI-25 turbofan engine, or AI-25TL, an aircraft power plant.

Produced by the Ukrainian aerospace company Motor Sich since the 1960s for the ubiquitous turboprop An-26 cargo plane, the AI-25L engine is dirt cheap, and thousands suitable for refurbishment are readily available in old An-26 planes, or in warehouses worldwide, an August Fire Point presentation said.

“Ukraine has invested enough money and propaganda into the FP-5 program that it is probable that the program will eventually succeed even after initial difficulties,” said Donald Hill, co-author of the OSINT-based military sitrep report Ukraine Update, in comments to Kyiv Post. “The FP-5 will likely be used to attack targets that other Ukrainian weapons cannot reach, penetrate, or damage to the same degree with smaller warheads. Being a local product, there are no restrictions on how it can be used.”

“There’s little Russia can do except take into account that more targets are now endangered and adjust their air defenses… Russia’s war is on a clock, and a successful Flamingo program speeds up the clock,” the former US Army officer said.

Germany in May announced it was earmarking $5.7 billion for joint production of long-range weapons, including missiles in Ukraine, according to official statements with “significant increases” expected by the end of 2025. Those comments by Germany Chancellor Friedrich Merz and others did not mention weapons by name.

Hans Petter Midttun, an ex-Norwegian Defense Staff member working at the Ukrainian Institute for Security and Law of the Sea, in comments to Kyiv Post said that although Ukrainian production claims are not proved, the fact the weapon exists combined with Ukraine’s track record of developing its own weapons to hit Russian weak points like energy infrastructure will force Russia to change its calculations about security and attacking Ukraine.

“Ukraine is gradually achieving strategic parity, greatly increasing Russian costs. The introduction of long-range strike capabilities is also helping reduce its dependency on Western strategic considerations – or rather Western policy of forcing Ukraine to fight with one hand tied on its back,” Midttun said. “Russia will no longer be able to wage war with impunity as its command-and-control network, air defense networks, defense industrial base, logistics, air and ground bases, and economy are being exposed to increasingly more strikes.”

Some analysts, led by Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have argued that a real Ukrainian ability to hit Russia with powerful long-range weapons would deter Ukraine’s allies from abandoning Ukraine, because doing so would escalate the Russo-Ukrainian War by giving Ukraine a stronger incentive to hit Russia harder, and to care less about escalation.

Ukraine watchers interviewed by Kyiv Post for this story had mixed views on the “be-Ukraine’s-ally-or-else” theory, but most agreed that the more powerful Ukrainian military capacity becomes, the more Ukraine would be a useful ally for its friends.

“I would say that this has been an effect of Ukraine’s domestic weapons production at large. It’s quite clear that Donald Trump was surprised to learn that Ukraine was actually much less dependent on the US than he thought and that it was therefore impossible to push Ukraine into a bad peace deal. Long-range cruise missiles just add to that calculation,” Nielsen said. “Another significant aspect of the Flamingo missile is that this is actually a capability that many European countries need right now. Having the ability to build these missiles creates opportunities for the defense industry, with Ukraine serving as a provider to other countries. This makes Ukraine a more attractive security partner.”

Observers likewise agreed that Ukraine will still want and need Western arms capable of doing jobs that home-produced weapons can’t.

“The Ukrainians will still want Taurus and Storm Shadow missiles, this (the Flamingo missile) isn’t a replacement for them. Those (Western) weapons are specially designed to hit defended, hardened targets,” Ryan said. “The Flamingo really can’t replicate that capacity.”

Kyrylo Budanov, Head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency HUR, Budanov, in Monday comments to Ukrainian media, said the bottom line is that Ukraine is at war, and in war the point is to find tools to hit the enemy effectively.

“Ninety-nine percent of the recent strikes carried out by Ukraine on Russian territory – including those on oil refineries – were executed using locally produced systems. Ukraine now operates independently and effectively – even Russia itself acknowledges this,” Budanov said. “Ukraine’s strikes have yielded far greater results on the Russian Federation than Western economic sanctions. Through direct action, we have inflicted much greater damage on the Russian Federation’s revenues than all the (Western) economic levers imposed so far. This is an unpleasant truth because it leads us to the following conclusion — the sanctions pressure is clearly insufficient. ““At the time when all this was starting [air strikes on Russian territory]… we were fighting with one hand tied behind our back,” Budanov said. “(N)ow we have our own production. Yes, we want more – we always want more. But it is precisely this local production that has given us the opportunity to use our forces and resources according to our strategy. Ultimately, this is what gets results.”

https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/62756