How a Zelensky-linked company became Ukraine’s biggest drone producer?

The Ukrainian defence company Fire Point has rapidly become one of the largest suppliers of unmanned systems to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, built up a portfolio of government contracts worth over a billion dollars, and launched joint industrial projects in Europe. Alongside the growth in production figures and the expansion of its missile arsenal, the company’s activities have become the subject of debate amongst industry experts and regulatory bodies regarding corporate transparency and the contractor’s technological capabilities.

The integration of the Ukrainian defence sector into the European industrial architecture is increasingly taking place with the involvement of private technology companies, amongst which Fire Point occupies a special place. In the autumn of 2025, through its subsidiary FRRT, the company reached an agreement with the Danish government to build a solid rocket propellant plant in Vojens, utilising the so-called “Danish scheme” of military aid with total funding of around €1.4 billion.

Copenhagen’s desire to speed up the launch of the site attracted the attention of the local press: as the newspaper Ekstra Bladet noted, when issuing permits, the authorities took the unprecedented step of relaxing procedures, making exceptions to around twenty national laws and regulations. The Danish Minister of Defence declined to comment, citing national security interests; however, the very fact that regulatory controls had been relaxed in the allocation of European funds sparked a lively debate among Danish observers.

Alongside the Danish project, the company is developing cooperation with leading European conglomerates: in June 2026, at the Eurosatory exhibition in Paris, the German group Hensoldt announced a strategic partnership with Fire Point in the field of missile defence. Furthermore, as part of the Freyja programme, the Ukrainian contractor is working with dozens of EU suppliers, including France’s Safran and Germany’s Diehl Defence, to establish cross-border production chains for new weapon systems.

To strengthen institutional trust in the West, at the end of 2025 the company invited Mike Pompeo, former Director of the CIA and ex-US Secretary of State, to join its advisory board, counting on his international standing. At the same time, an attempt to attract major capital from the Middle East – the sale of a 33 per cent stake to the UAE-based EDGE Group for $600 million – came to nothing after the deal was blocked by the Ukrainian antitrust regulator.

The scale of Fire Point’s international ambitions is directly underpinned by its financial performance within Ukraine, which shows rapid growth. While the company’s revenue stood at $4 million in 2023, by 2024 it had exceeded $100 million, and by the end of 2025, the value of deliveries of just one type of drone was estimated at 13.2 billion hryvnia (around $320 million), equivalent to almost a third of the Ministry of Defence’s entire budget for UAV procurement.

According to Reuters estimates, the company accounted for around 10 per cent of the country’s total defence procurement, whereas its total portfolio of government contracts, according to The New York Times, exceeded the $1 billion mark. Such rapid financial growth attracted the close attention of state auditors: their investigation revealed that, when concluding contracts, the company had circumvented the mandatory price approval procedure, leading to an overpayment of approximately $16.7 million.

At the same time, since spring 2025, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) has been investigating the supplier’s contracts for possible overpricing of components, discrepancies in supply volumes and the receipt of preferential budgetary funding. Documents released by the agency include a recording of a conversation between former Defence Minister Rustem Umerov and businessman Tymur Mindich, in which the allocation of 311 billion hryvnia ($7 billion) for Fire Point products was discussed, although the company itself categorically denies having received these funds.

The company’s production programme is centred on the FP-1 long-range aircraft-type drones (costing around $55,000, with a payload of up to 59 kg and a range from 1,370 km in the basic configuration to 2,700 km in the upgraded version) and the medium-range FP-2 drones (with a range of 200-370 km). In the spring of 2026, the company’s management announced the production of hundreds of drones per month, claiming that the company’s equipment meets up to 55 per cent of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ requirements for long-range UAVs.

According to management estimates, the company’s products are also involved in approximately 60 per cent of strikes on targets deep within Russian territory, although there is no independent confirmation of these figures. The contractor’s missile developments have sparked considerably more heated debate amongst experts: the FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missile, unveiled in August 2025 (with a claimed range of up to 3,000 km and warhead – 1 tonne) has met with serious scepticism from Western military analysts.

The missile is based on Soviet blueprints for the Tu-141 “Strizh” UAV and the German “V-1,” utilising decommissioned AI-25TL aircraft engines from L-39 training aircraft. The Economist and OSINT researchers have highlighted the low confirmed success rate: by spring 2026, out of 23 reported launches, only two hits had been verified, at a total cost of around $23 million, while CEO Iryna Terekh explained that the engineers had borrowed some of the design solutions from open sources.

Western experts are equally cautious in their assessment of the prospects for the FP-7 and FP-9 ballistic missiles, as well as the FP-7x anti-aircraft interceptor for the “Freya” air defence system, which is positioned as a budget alternative to the American Patriot system ($700,000 versus $3.8 million per missile). The test schedule for these systems has been postponed on several occasions – FP-9 tests were rescheduled from 2025 to 2026, while the launch of “Freya” has been delayed until 2027.

Analysts at Military Watch Magazine, The New York Times and Bloomberg point out that the roll-out of full-scale production of modern interceptors in Ukraine is being held back by fundamental technological barriers. The country lacks a closed-loop production cycle for composite solid rocket propellant and the technologies required for its polymerisation – the development of which takes decades – and there are no specialised alloys or industrial equipment for machining components capable of withstanding g-forces of up to 30g in the upper atmosphere.

Furthermore, the traditional enterprises in the Ukrainian sector – the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and the Yuzhmash plant – have historically specialised in liquid-fuelled launch vehicles and have lost a significant proportion of their workforce over the last ten years. In this regard, a number of industry experts believe that rocket programmes such as the FP-7x primarily serve an administrative and financial purpose, enabling the company to attract budgetary funding and negotiate Western licences through official registration in state registers.

The unusual nature of the Fire Point phenomenon becomes even more apparent when examining the company’s corporate history; by 2026, its workforce had reached 3,700 employees across more than fifty secure sites. Prior to the outbreak of full-scale hostilities in 2022, the legal entity associated with the company operated under the name Centrocast and specialised in location scouting and casting for the film and television industry, including projects by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “Kvartal 95” studio.

At the end of 2022, the business was reoriented towards defence contracts, although none of the key executives had any prior experience in missile engineering or the defence industry. The majority shareholder (97.5 per cent) and chief designer, Denys Shtilerman, held Russian citizenship until 2008 and worked at a research institute under the Russian Ministry of Defence; he subsequently worked in property development and did not disclose his ownership of the company for three years due to the risk of sanctions.

Co-owner Ihor Skalyha, who is responsible for communications with the defence ministry, previously headed Centrocast, while CEO Iryna Terekh managed the production of concrete structures for urban environments until 2022. A separate set of issues concerns informal links: Shtilerman confirmed that negotiations had taken place with Mindich – a co-owner of “Kvartal 95” and a figure implicated in the “Energoatom” case – regarding the sale of half the business; these, he said, came to nothing.

However, in the spring of 2025, another individual implicated in the case – Ihor Fursenko – was taken on by Fire Point to obtain permission to travel abroad, whilst complaints about the quality of early batches of drones were raised by Yuriy Kasyanov, a former commander of an aerial reconnaissance unit, whose unit was soon disbanded. Although no formal charges have been brought against the management and the company has commissioned an international audit, its European partners will have to strike a balance between the speed of deliveries and compliance standards

Credit: https://billgalston.substack.com/p/how-a-zelensky-linked-company-became