Iryna Terekh was making benches and flower pots in Kyiv when Russia invaded. She now runs Fire Point, the Ukrainian company that says its drones fly roughly 60 percent of the country’s long-range strikes into Russia, and the move that put her there was a manufacturing decision. Handed a long-range drone design she judged unsuited to volume production, she proposed a different way to build the wing. Build time fell from six days to two and a half hours.

That aircraft became the FP-1, the drone at the center of Ukraine’s campaign against Russian oil refineries. The Wall Street Journal profiled Terekh on Sunday, tracing her route from a bullet hole in her car’s rear bumper outside Bucha in March 2022 to the top of a company that now claims 7,000 employees. When DroneXL reported Fire Point’s headcount in March, it was 3,700.

A Concrete And Furniture Background Solved Fire Point’s Wing Bottleneck

Terekh trained as an architect and ran a company making outdoor furniture and architectural concrete before the war. Fire Point co-founder Denys Shtilerman hired her as production director in 2023 to turn prototypes into serial output. Her materials knowledge reshaped how the FP-1 wing gets built.

Shtilerman, an engineer and physicist who had been buying drones for the Ukrainian military through a nonprofit, contacted her in late 2022 after growing frustrated with what they cost. He wanted someone who could mass-produce what he was designing. Terekh wanted more than that. She spent nights reading Soviet-era missile manuals and hired a rocket scientist in his nineties as an adviser, according to her account to the Journal.

Six days to two and a half hours. That single process change is what converts a workable drone design into a strategic weapon, and it came from someone who had spent her career thinking about molds and curing times rather than how an airframe behaves in air. “I would never have gotten involved with weapons if my country wasn’t invaded,” Terekh told the Journal.

She was confirmed as chief executive in March 2026, succeeding co-founder Yehor Skalyha while keeping the CTO role. Terekh has said Fire Point does not choose targets inside Russia, leaving that to the military, and she has publicly disputed Russian claims of civilian casualties from Ukrainian long-range strikes.

Fire Point’s Headcount Has Nearly Doubled Since March

Fire Point counted about 3,700 employees in March 2026, reached 6,000 by late July across 83 Ukrainian plants plus one in Denmark, and passed 7,000 in early August. Every one of those figures traces back to the company itself, not to an outside auditor.

The production claims scale the same way. DroneXL reported in March that the company was building 200 long-range drones a day across more than 50 sites, with Shtilerman saying capacity could double or triple. On July 23 the company announced a target of more than 100,000 FP-1 and FP-2 units for the 2026 calendar year, up from 200 FP-1 systems in 2023. Terekh told CNBC on August 8 that hitting the six-figure number looks realistic.

One caveat sits underneath all of it. The Associated Press toured a Fire Point factory in August 2025 and recorded roughly 100 units a day at about $55,000 each, and open-source analysts still treat that visit as the last time an outsider watched the line run. Everything since is company-stated. Fire Point does not appear shy about the exposure: at Eurosatory in June it ran fresh combat video from a Moscow refinery strike on a loop at its own booth, hours after the attack.

The Flamingo’s Advertised Range Is Roughly Double What Terekh Quotes

Public specifications for the FP-5 Flamingo list a 1,864-mile (3,000 km) range and a warhead of about 2,535 pounds (1,150 kg). Terekh told The Guardian in July that the missile’s real range is closer to 1,118 miles (1,800 km). Both numbers are still in circulation.

The FP-1’s range has moved in the other direction. The baseline drone flew 994 miles (1,600 km). Fire Point published upgraded specifications in July putting the deep-strike version at 2,113 miles (3,400 km) with a 132-pound (60 kg) warhead, achieved by integrating an additional fuel tank into a redesigned wing. That upgraded figure lines up with the 2,100 miles the Journal cites. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on June 20 that the improved FP-1 had struck the Tyumen refinery, more than 1,240 miles (2,000 km) from Ukraine’s border.

Terekh puts the Flamingo’s production cost at roughly $600,000 per unit, against a U.S. Tomahawk at about $3.5 million. The missile’s name came from a test launch: prototypes were painted in bright colors so debris would be easy to recover, and after a pink one flew, male staff joked about what happens when a woman runs a defense company. The joke stuck to the missile. Ukraine’s long-range fleet now runs well past Fire Point’s catalog, including the Sichen strike drone DroneXL covered in April, but the FP-1 remains the volume workhorse.

Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Bureau Is Still Reviewing Fire Point’s Contracts

NABU opened criminal proceeding No. 52025000000000048 on February 3, 2025, examining whether state officials and drone manufacturers colluded to inflate production costs in defense contracts. Six producers are under review, and Fire Point’s contracts from August 2023 through November 2024 sit inside the file.

The Kyiv Independent first reported the Fire Point inquiry in August 2025, citing sources who described questions about inflated component costs, overstated delivery numbers, or both. The New York Times followed in October with an audit finding: procurement officers calculated that the FP-1 could be built for less than the $58,000 per unit Fire Point quoted in December 2024, an assessment that should have triggered mandatory renegotiation by Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency and did not. Contracts went out roughly $16.7 million above the cheaper option. The audit document itself has not been published, and DroneXL has been covering the probe since October 2025.

The ownership questions are messier than any profile format allows. Shtilerman told a parliamentary commission on May 13 that Timur Mindich, the Kvartal 95 co-owner and Zelenskyy associate now a suspect in the Midas corruption case, tried to buy half of Fire Point for $1 billion between spring 2024 and August 2025, and that Mindich was never an owner or beneficiary. Terekh has explained separately that Shtilerman himself was kept off the public ownership record for a long stretch because he held Russian citizenship and his family remained in Russia after the invasion. Skalyha transferred close to 100 percent of the shares to him in November 2025. Ukraine’s anti-corruption community reads all of this as a monopoly problem rather than a pricing one.

NABU’s most recent public statement on the case is a written reply dated May 14, 2026, sent to Fire Point’s lawyer and published by Shtilerman. It confirms that no notice of suspicion has been served on the company’s leadership or founders, that no indictment has been drafted, and that Fire Point has not been entered in the state register as a legal entity against which criminal measures may be applied. Under Ukrainian procedure, that means the investigation is running against the fact of an offense rather than against named individuals.

The commercial cost has been real anyway. Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee returned EDGE Group’s application to buy a 30 percent stake on January 14, 2026, a deal that implied a $2.5 billion valuation and would have brought in about $760 million. Shtilerman told lawmakers in May that the company has moved past it, having turned down an investment bank’s March approach built on a $5.8 billion valuation. Fire Point also commissioned an outside audit of its own pricing, and on November 12, 2025 it created an advisory board and named former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to it, executives told the Associated Press. Advisory board, not the board of directors, is the accurate description of that seat.

DroneXL’s Take

The part of this story worth copying is the wing process. Most Western drone programs I follow are optimizing airframes, sensor stacks and autonomy stacks, and the company currently reshaping a war got its decisive win from someone who understood how material behaves in a mold. Fire Point’s FP-1 is plywood and carbon fiber. It is not a clever aircraft. It is a manufacturable one, and manufacturable beat clever.

That is the transferable lesson, and it survives the obvious objection. Nearly every number in this article originates with Fire Point: the headcount, the daily output, the 60 percent share of deep strikes, the six days and the two and a half hours. The NABU file is open. The New York Times reported an audit finding that Ukraine’s own procurement agency signed contracts roughly $16.7 million above a cheaper option without the renegotiation the rules required. Ukraine’s auditors think somebody overpaid, and I take that seriously. But a process change is not an invoice. Even if a Ukrainian court eventually rules that the state was charged too much for these drones, the wing still comes off the jig in two and a half hours.

What I keep coming back to is the silence. NABU’s last public word on this case is that May 14 letter, and three months later there are no suspicions and no closure. I can’t tell you which direction that points, and anyone who claims to is guessing. Nobody has been charged, and nobody has been cleared either, which is a genuinely bad place for Ukraine’s largest private arms supplier to sit while European governments decide how much to hand it. Terekh told CNBC that a hold-up in European funding is capping Flamingo output right now. Watch whether that money moves before winter, when Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refining and Russia’s campaign against the Ukrainian grid both peak. If European capital arrives with an unresolved corruption file still open, that tells you exactly how the continent is pricing the tradeoff between clean procurement and drones that actually reach Tyumen.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal (Matthew Luxmoore), The New York Times, CNBC, The Guardian, Kyiv Independent, Associated Press, NABU, Ukrainska Pravda.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.