Ukraine has gone into serial production of its new Flamingo ICBM, its longest-range and most powerful missile yet.

While Ukraine has ramped up drone production and is currently making some 2.5mn drones a year, it has been sorely lacking in missiles that can strike targets deep in Russia’s hinterland.

Thanks to the Cold War legacy, Russia has a long tradition of making missiles and introduced the new hypersonic missiles, which President Vladimir Putin showcased during his 2018 state of the nation speech. More recently, Putin showcased its new Oreshnik ICBM that can hit any city in Europe in under 20 minutes flight time and plans to station some of these in Belarus before the end of the year.

Putin put the whole Russian economy on a war footing shortly after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and currently manufactures some 1,200 missiles a year, which it has been using since the Kremlin launched a devastating missile barrage in May and has since ramped up a missile war.

Ukraine has been trying to counter this onslaught but has run desperately low on air defence ammo. At the same time, as its Western allies have been reluctant to provide it with long-range missiles, Ukraine has increasingly turned to domestic production and has ramped up its own attacks on military targets inside Russia. Last week it was reported that it had completely destroyed a pumping station that is part of the Soviet-era Druzhba oil pipeline, cutting off piped oil supplies to Hungary as a result.

Ukraine has already developed the Neptune shore to ship missiles that it has used to good effect to drive Russia’s Black Sea Fleet out of its homebases in Crimea. More recently it developed and tested its own cruise missile, Palyanytsia that has a range of approximately 600-700 km, allowing it to target Russian military airfields and Bankova doesn’t need US permission to use it. The Palyanytsia is a hybrid between a missile and a drone, which makes it unique and hard for Russian defences to counter.

However, the Flamingo is a fully fledged ICBM with a 1,000km range that can reach all of European Russia and reportedly as far as Iran, although few other details have been released.

The missile was first publicly mentioned in 2024, and may have already been used in several long-range strikes inside Russia, including attacks on airfields, logistics hubs, and oil depots far from the Ukrainian border. Ukrainian officials have not disclosed technical specifications, but President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has alluded to the development of domestically produced long-range weapons capable of striking targets at significant distances.

In August 2024, Ukrainska Pravda and other local media outlets reported that Ukraine had successfully used a new long-range cruise missile “of its own production” to hit military targets within Russia. While the missile was not named officially, defence analysts and military bloggers began referring to it as the "Flamingo", based on internal sources and possibly a codename used during testing phases.

The Flamingo is part of a broader push to develop independent strike capabilities, alongside systems like the Hrim-2, Neptune, and various drone-based munitions.

A senior Ukrainian defence official, speaking anonymously to Reuters in July, said: “Our capabilities are growing. We now have tools to reach where we could not before.”

Previously, the Biden administration was reluctant to give Ukraine long-range missiles and even those they supplied like the HIMARS and ATACMS were both restricted in range and came with explicit usage conditions imposed by the Americans as part of its “escalation containment” policies. Kyiv has as a result developed its own missiles that do not have these restrictions and is increasingly using its own weapons to hit high value targets inside Russia, focusing in particular on oil production and storage targets.