Ukrainian Engineers Keep Squeezing More Fuel Into Their Best Deep Strike Drones
A Fire Point FP-1 can now range 3,000 km
This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.
On June 20, Ukrainian Fire Point FP-1 one-way attack drones motored more than 2,000 km to blast an oil refinery in Tyumen, in central Russia. The result was, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “an effective strike” on a refinery that processes as many as 9 million tons of crude a year.
The potential impact on the refinery and Russia’s wider oil industry is less notable than the sheer distance the propeller-drive FP-1s traveled, however. The Saturday raid was apparently the combat debut of a new, longer-ranged FP-1 model that had made its first public appearance just a few days earlier.
"The job was carried out by the new, upgraded FP drones that can now reach targets at distances of 3,000 kilometers," Zelenskyy wrote. "I am grateful to the Fire Point engineers."
Drone- and missile-maker Fire Point has been steadily enhancing the FP-1 and its shorter-range, heavier-warhead FP-2 variant ever since selling the first copies to Ukrainian forces back in 2024. Priced to move at as little as $50,000 per drone and designed for mass production on the scale of hundreds of drones a day, the FP-1/2 doesn't just lend mass to the Ukrainian deep strike campaign. It also lends the campaign some of its most advanced capabilities.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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