FP-5 Flamingo: Ukraine’s 1,900-Mile Pink Hammer

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

The FP-5 Flamingo is a roughly 13,000-pound pink cruise missile carrying a 2,540-pound warhead out to extraordinary distances. Its origin story involves Ukrainian startups, worn-out jet engines, international misdirection, and one of the strangest weapons to emerge from the war.

Ukraine’s Arctic Strike Put Fire Point in the Spotlight

On Wednesday, 9 September 2026, Ukrainian Fire Point drones struck an industrial energy/gas facility in Novy Urengoy, Yamalo-Nents Autonomous Okrug, Russia. This attack was significant in that the weapons used had been launched in Ukraine and subsequently traveled some 2,050 miles before impact. That’s like firing a missile in Philadelphia and having it accurately strike a target in Phoenix. Prior to this moment, the Russians believed that their Arctic energy processing plants were safe from Ukrainian attack. Now, they are not.

The Arctic strike itself involved Fire Point drones. The company’s headline cruise missile is the FP-5 Flamingo. The distinction matters, but so does the larger story. Fire Point has become one of the more fascinating examples of what happens when a wartime startup starts building weapons for distances that once seemed safely beyond reach.

Footage of the attack showed bright orange flames from the burning refinery spilling a massive column of black smoke into the air. The Russians claimed there were no casualties. Perhaps that was the case, but the Russians do lie a lot. I found the story behind the weapons emerging from Fire Point to be frankly mesmerizing.

How Ukraine’s War Set the Stage for the FP-5 Flamingo

The details of this story are all drawn from open sources. I’m not awesome enough to be privy to classified military intelligence anymore. However, we can glean insight into a tale most compelling that is helping to illuminate how the war in Ukraine has changed modern weapons development.

When Russia rolled across the Ukrainian border in February 2022 with 120 Battalion Tactical Groups, they anticipated a rout. Russian planners expected to subdue the country in three days. Officers brought dress uniforms for the inevitable victory parade through Kyiv. Now, some four years later, nearly half a million Russians have died to secure one fifth of the total Ukrainian territory. After four long years of brutal combat, the battlefield has evolved radically. That’s because the world has discovered a new way to fight wars.

Russia launched their ill-conceived Special Military Operation firmly grounded in Cold War ideology, using Space Age tech. However, the rest of the world had already embraced the Information Age. Things move faster today than was previously the case. With Russia serving as an existential threat and the utter destruction of their homeland riding in the balance, normal everyday Ukrainians stepped up to do their bit. One such example was a tiny little startup called Fire Point.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Build a Pink Cruise Missile

Fire Point was not part of the traditional Ukrainian military-industrial complex. The folks who started it were not soldiers. They were engineers, architects, and game designers who figured they would use their particular skills to help take the fight to the Russians. They have been lyrically successful. Their newest flagship product is the FP-5 Flamingo missile.

They named the thing the Flamingo because early versions were painted pink. One reference I found said that had simply been a mistake. Another stated that this was a tribute to the many women who worked to design and produce these novel weapons. Regardless, the curious name stuck. Now the Russians are wishing they had never heard of this big pink bird.

FP-5 Flamingo Specs: 13,000 Pounds of Pink Cruise Missile

The FP-5 Flamingo is a beast of a thing. It is about 40 feet long and weighs in the neighborhood of 13,000 pounds. The FP-5 sports a 20-foot wingspan and carries a 2,540-pound high-explosive warhead.

The basic layout resembles that of the infamous German V1 buzz bomb that the Nazis used to terrorize London during WW2. That means a long cylindrical fuselage mated to a pair of stubby wings. The tail assembly in this case is an X-shaped cruciform design. The whole thing is made from radar-transparent fiberglass that is hard to detect and cheap to produce.

The guidance system is GPS/GNSS-based with an inertial navigation system backup. That makes the weapon tough to jam. Accuracy is purported to be within 46 feet at a range of 1,900 miles.

Model	FP-5 Flamingo
Manufacturer	Fire Point
Type	Long-range cruise missile
Length	About 40 feet
Weight	In the neighborhood of 13,000 pounds
Wingspan	20 feet
Warhead	2,540-pound high explosive warhead
Range	1,900 miles
Claimed Accuracy	Within 46 feet
Unit Cost	Around $500,000

What Powers the FP-5 Flamingo’s Big Pink Airframe

The Flamingo uses a two-stage launch and propulsion system. To get this massive monster going, a solid rocket engine boosts it off the ground. Once airborne, the FP-5 is driven by a Czech AI-25TL turbofan. It is the story behind these particular engines that most captivated me.

The AI-25TL is used in lots of different airplanes. That includes the YAK-40 airliner, the Chinese Hongdu L-11 fighter-trainer, and the Polish PZL M-15 Belphegor, the world’s only jet-powered biplane. Most importantly, however, the AI-25TL also powers the Czech L-39 Albatross.

The L-39 is one of the most popular jet trainer aircraft in the world. 2,900 of the total 3,000-plane production run remain in active use today. As a result, tens of thousands of these engines have seen service. Worn out versions with no meaningful service life remaining litter the globe. In 2025, somebody started quietly buying up these worthless high-mileage turbofan engines wherever they could be found.

How Fire Point Reportedly Hunted Down Old Jet Engines

The Russians were ill-advised, but they’re not stupid. Despite sundry wars around the globe, everybody still attends massive military expos trying to hawk their wares. During the IDEX-2025 exhibition in the UAE back in February of 2025, the international weapons company Milanion Group sponsored a prominent display. The Milanion Group is an established UAE company with a division in the UK. They have nothing to do with Ukraine.

Among their many products, however, was a curious buzzbomb-looking thing. They quietly put the word out that they were looking for old AI-25TL engines. They supposedly did all of this simply as a favor to the Ukrainians. That threw the Russians off the scent.

Before anyone was the wiser, Fire Point had bought up a zillion of these old engines. These missiles only need to fly for four hours. All of these old turbofans were well past their prime, but they had another four hours remaining for a one-way trip from Ukraine to Russia. The Ukrainians recently began using Flamingos along with a variety of other drones and missiles to target Russian infrastructure across the country. The FP-5 is capable of reaching 90% of Russian industrial targets from Ukrainian launch points. Oil and gas facilities are particularly vulnerable.

Deep Strikes Push the War Into Russia’s Industrial Heartland

Strangely, this has not much been in the mainstream news. Pull up X and punch in “Moscow Air Attack” for details. The videos are quite compelling. Ukrainian drones and missiles blew the holy bejeebers out of Moscow-area refineries. Russian air defenders were launching shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles from crowded highways. One such Russian missile misfired and struck a massive gasoline storage tank, blowing the top off of it like a paint can hit with a high-velocity rifle bullet. The cumulative effect was quite surreal.

Fire Point’s goal is 200 FP-5 Flamingos per month. Each missile costs around $500,000. This is obviously not front pocket change, but it is a fraction of what we pay for a T-LAM Tomahawk.

The Flamingo flies really low, but it is visible to the Russian A-50U airborne AWACS system. For this reason, the Ukrainians have made destruction of these irreplaceable aircraft a priority. The Soviets built 42 of these expensive, complex planes back during the Cold War. Ukraine shot down two and destroyed another pair on the ground. The Russians have been reported as having either four or five that are still operational. As it takes three to provide around-the-clock radar coverage without taking maintenance issues into consideration, things are getting pretty tight in Moscow nowadays. It is really tough to detect these low-flying Flamingos without an airborne radar.

FP-5 Flamingo Strengths and Limitations

• Reported strengths: 1,900-mile range, 2,540-pound high explosive warhead, low-altitude flight, fiberglass construction, inertial navigation backup, and a unit cost described as around $500,000.
• Reported limitations: The missile can still be detected by airborne radar, production scale remains important, and many of the most impressive performance figures available publicly originate with Ukrainian or manufacturer sources.

Ukraine’s Drone Factories Are Changing the Math

The Russians have fired their bolt. Their massive Cold War inventory of tanks, planes, and weapons has been incinerated in four years of bloody combat. At the same time, the Ukrainian drone industry has been turbocharged. Five hundred Ukrainian companies produced some 4 million weaponized drones in 2025. That number will approach 8 million in 2026. Many of those are small horrifying FPV tactical drones. However, a noteworthy percentage are heavy weapons like the Flamingo that can range all across the Russian homeland.

The Russians invaded Ukraine expecting a cakewalk. Now Putin has a tiger by the tail. If he lets up even for a moment, somebody is going to throw him out of a tall window someplace. He no longer has any good solutions.

How Ukraine’s Drone War Is Rewriting Modern Combat

The war in Ukraine has transformed modern combat in ways not seen since World War 2. Russia launched the invasion like it was 1986. Now their infrastructure is getting hammered like it is 2026.

Russia is roughly 28 times larger than Ukraine by landmass. However, Ukraine produced an inordinate percentage of the weapons used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Their aerospace and automotive industries in particular were extensive. Much of that institutional knowledge remains within the country. Four years of total war have awakened and energized that huge industrial base. The result is the FP-5 Flamingo and scads of other innovative weapons like it.

The Ukrainians are far from perfect. Corruption remains a pervasive problem. However, we have no shortage of that over on our side of the pond, as well. Regardless, they certainly didn’t ask to have Putin’s legions come ravage their country and murder their citizens.

Ukraine can win this war. To do so, they need only survive. Eventually the Russians will run out of both meat and money. Now that Flamingos and other Ukrainian deep-strike weapons are ranging across the Russian heartland, that calculus seems to be shifting in Ukraine’s favor. If I were Vladimir Putin, I’d start shopping for an island someplace, ideally something within the confines of North Korea. The writing is on the wall.

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