Ukraine’s FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile powered by Soviet engines salvaged from rubbish dumps
September 24, 2025
Ukraine’s FP-5 “Flamingo” ground-launched heavy cruise missile has attracted attention for two reasons: its unusually large size and the unconventional supply chain that underpins it.
Developed by Ukrainian firm Fire Point, the Flamingo is claimed to carry a very large warhead and to be built rapidly using widely available Soviet-era AI-25 turbofan engines, many recovered, refurbished or bought in bulk from old stocks.
The FP-5 Flamingo’s miracle Soviet AI-25 engine
The engine Ukraine found available in large numbers is the Soviet Ivchenko AI-25 medium bypass jet engine. During Soviet times, over 6,000 of these engines were manufactured for aircraft, while Ukraine continues to build the engine for the Czech L-39 Albatross training aircraft. The engine also powers the Chinese Hongdu JL-8 jet trainer.
Ukraine says there are thousands of these engines in post-Soviet states, Asia, and Africa. This means not only does Ukraine have the technical know-how for these engines, but there are scores of them around the world that have all but reached the end of their useful lives. Ukraine is able to sidestep the high cost and bottlenecks of other missiles.
Spent AI-25 engines are available and cheap. Ukraine’s contractor, Fire Point, purchased a large stock of these old engines before starting mass production. These worn-out engines have a residual life of up to just 10 hours remaining. This means they are useless for aircraft, but are suitable for a final one-way flight.
🇺🇦 @mil_in_ua reports that Fire Point, the manufacturer of the FP-5 Flamingo Cruise Missile, bought out a large stock of spare AI-25 jet engines that had service lives of about 10 hours remaining before they launched serial production of the FP-5.
— Jeff2146🇧🇪 (@Jeff21461) September 23, 2025
The company also reports that… pic.twitter.com/Uv8kFdlBZI
According to the Ukrainian news outlet, Militarnyi, only 3.5 hours are required for post-repair tests and the actual flight phase. The engines are restored with cheaper and easier-to-manufacture materials in place of wear-resistant titanium parts.
Additionally, Ukraine is preparing to manufacture the engine in large numbers. Ukraine is one of only a few countries able to design and build jet engines.
Motor Sich is the Ukrainian contractor that produces jet engines, although it is currently not supplying new engines for the Flamingo. Instead, the current “many-month” supply was “found in a landfill” and restored by Ukraine.
Flamingo’s remarkable production rate
The speed at which Ukraine developed the FP-5 Flamingo is remarkable. The concept was still “on a napkin” in the summer of 2024.
Also remarkable is the pace at which Ukraine is building the missile’s body. It is manufactured automatically on a carbon fibre winding machine, and the whole fuselage manufacturing cycle only takes six hours.
But perhaps the most remarkable speed is the rate at which Ukraine plans to produce the missile. According to another Militarnyi article, the current production rate is around two missiles a day, with plans to reach 200 FP-5s a month by the end of 2025.
If realised, this would allow Ukraine’s missile production to be more or less on par with Russia’s strategic missile production rate, according to a Kyiv Independent estimate of Russian production.
🇺🇦 The Ukrainian company Fire Point has released additional information about significant upgrades to the FP-5 "Flamingo" cruise missile:
— Visioner (@visionergeo) September 24, 2025
▪️ Several new types of warheads, focus on the production and mass adoption of internal embedded engines. Using automated technology, they… pic.twitter.com/4DKCX7zdiD
The missile flies low at 50 meters or lower and carries a 1,150 kg payload. While the missile is easy to intercept, Ukraine plans to use it in coordination with other assets (like drones absorbing air defence fire) to allow them to get through. Its accuracy is claimed to be 14 meters, even when it is jammed by electronic warfare.
FP-5 Flamingo free from size constraints
The new FP-5 Flamingo ground-launched, heavy cruise missile has been designed to fit the budget, resources, and requirements of Ukraine. With Western countries typically forbidding Ukraine from firing its advanced systems into internationally recognised Russian territory, Ukraine needed a domestic solution that foreign partners would not have a veto over.
Ukraine also has the liberty of disregarding one of the biggest limitations and cost drivers of Western cruise missiles: miniaturisation. US ship-launched cruise missiles, like the Tomahawk, are expensive partly because they need to be miniaturised to fit in a ship’s launch cells with similar size and weight constraints for air-launch missiles.
The FP-5 Flamingo is not the first ground-launched cruise missile Ukraine has developed. Famously, in 2022, Ukraine’s then-new Neptune anti-ship missile sank the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
