From the sell-off of the Soviet defense industry to domestic ballistic missiles: what Ukraine lost and is restoring
Kyiv • UNN
Ukraine has a powerful missile legacy; however, after the collapse of the USSR, a significant portion of the industry's production capabilities and technological potential was lost. Modern developments are paving the way for the restoration of Ukraine's own ballistic missile capabilities.
For decades, Ukraine lost defense enterprises, technologies, and engineers, even though after the collapse of the Soviet Union it inherited a powerful missile industry. Now, amid a full-scale war, the country is trying to restore these capabilities. UNN, together with experts, examined why Ukraine lost part of its industrial potential and how difficult it is now to rebuild its own missile school.
Two years to develop a ballistic missile
After decades of decline in Ukraine’s defense industry, the country developed its own FP-7 ballistic missile in a short period of time. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced its first combat use on October 1, 2026.
According to its CEO, Iryna Terekh, Fire Point created the missile in just two years.
When it comes to the development timeline for what one might call a conventional ballistic missile, it generally takes around 15 years on average, although it can range from 7 to 30. Before the FP-7, the shortest recorded development time for a ballistic missile was 7 years, whereas we reduced it to two
She said that the team worked intensively, sought to optimize the development process, and move to testing as quickly as possible. Some solutions had to be invented anew.
The CEO of Fire Point also noted that the company financed the development with its own funds.
The development of the FP-7 in two years shows that Ukrainian companies are capable of rapidly creating complex missile technologies even amid a full-scale war. It is now important to build on this result: establish serial production and continue developing the technologies.
But why does Ukraine have to restore its missile industry amid a war at all, if it once had a powerful industrial base and participated in the creation of strategic missile systems?
What Ukraine inherited after the collapse of the USSR
After the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine inherited part of the Soviet defense industry. The country had design schools, production facilities, engineers, and experience working on complex technological projects.
At the same time, military experts note that the inherited industry was not fully autonomous. According to defense industry expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, Ukraine received "fragments of broken production chains without a closed cycle and a specific pool of customers"—mostly authoritarian countries in the Third World, while no one even attempted to integrate into the U.S. or European markets.
After gaining independence, Ukraine needed to restructure this system to meet its own needs, determine priorities for developing the army, and create conditions for modernizing enterprises. However, for decades the defense industry did not receive sufficiently consistent support, while a significant part of state policy focused on using resources that were already available.
Military expert Ivan Stupak believes that Soviet stockpiles largely created a false sense of adequacy.
Until 2013, there was a department for surplus property, which was simply sold off. I knew people who worked at "Ukrspetsexport," and they told me: "We sold a tank to Pakistan, sold a plane somewhere else—everything is fine, we are making money." And these huge stockpiles created the illusion that we did not need to do anything
According to him, the country had technical developments that it could have used to advance its own missile programs, but it failed to do so in time.
How selling off assets turned into the loss of technologies
The problem was not only that Ukraine failed to create enough new weapons. The production capabilities themselves gradually weakened: enterprises lost orders, equipment became outdated, cooperative ties collapsed, and skilled workers left the industry.
Defense industry expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi attributes this to the lack of a long-term defense strategy and the state’s inability to restructure the inherited industry for new conditions.
In his assessment, some enterprises found themselves in a situation where they had to maintain production without stable orders or clear development prospects. This led to bankruptcies, the loss of equipment, and a reduction in technological capabilities.
The main problem of those twenty years was the absolute absence of a state defense doctrine. Instead of modernization and a transition to domestic production cycles, the country lived in an infantile illusion of security under the umbrella of the Budapest Memorandum, selling off Soviet arsenals for pennies and sincerely believing that it would never again need an army or defense industry
One of the most difficult consequences was the loss of specialists. Engineering expertise is developed through years of practical work, and without stable production, young specialists have no opportunity to gain experience and learn from their senior colleagues.
Money can buy any five-axis machine tool or build a clean hangar, but it is impossible to instantly restore the culture of chemistry, materials science, and solid-state physics. Over these two decades, we completely destroyed specialty chemicals and propellant production: the Shostka giants ("Zirka" and "Svema") deteriorated to such an extent that the country lost the complete production cycle for creating nitrocellulose, artillery propellants, and solid rocket fuel—something that cannot be restored without decades of chemical schools. We completely buried our own military microelectronics and microwave technology (ultra-high frequencies): plants such as Lviv's "Polaron," Kyiv's "Saturn," and Zaporizhzhia's "Gamma" no longer grew crystals or produced componentry for radars and active radar homing heads, which left us dependent on imports even for basic sensors. This was compounded by the degradation of specialty metallurgy: the loss of technologies for precision casting of monolithic blades for aircraft and gas-turbine engines, as well as special armor-grade and heat-resistant titanium alloys
According to him, another consequence was the loss of schools of large-scale engineering design.
Mykolaiv's heavy shipbuilding disappeared forever: along with the bankruptcy of the Black Sea Shipyard and the Shipyard named after the 61st Communist, the school of calculating and welding ocean-class hulls, aligning shaft lines, and coordinating thousands of suppliers for cruisers and aircraft carriers also died. Aircraft manufacturing at Kharkiv's KhAZ and Kyiv's "Aviant" lost the culture of serial assembly: one may have the brilliant Antonov design bureau, but if a plant produces one aircraft in ten years, engineers forget how to organize a serial takt-time assembly line
He emphasized that this concerns not only equipment and infrastructure, but also the experience passed from one generation of engineers to the next.
The main irreparable loss is "shop-floor memory." If the chief metallurgist or optical-mechanical alignment technologist at the Arsenal plant retires without passing the nuances on to an apprentice, the technology dies forever. And it is impossible to train a chief designer of a missile system or a developer of a thermal-imaging array with money—you need 15–20 years of continuous practical work on actual serial products for that
How to develop Ukrainian missile manufacturing
Restoring lost production capabilities is very difficult. Experts note that this requires not only engineering solutions, but also stable funding, long-term state orders, specialist training, and a clear strategy for developing the defense industry.
Military expert Ivan Stupak emphasizes that the full-scale war has forced Ukraine to accelerate weapons development. However, speed must not replace a systematic approach: defense technologies require long-term investment, and the result cannot always be achieved within a single budget year.
The defense industry does not work in such a way that you provide money today and go to a store tomorrow to buy a missile. You can invest in 2026 and see the result only in 2032
In his opinion, Ukraine needs a mechanism to support promising military developments modeled on the American DARPA agency, which funds research and development in defense technologies.
We have a great many talented people who can create extraordinarily interesting things. The main thing is to provide them with funding and ensure its stability
At the same time, Anatoliy Khrapchynskyi believes that restoring Ukraine's defense industry depends not only on financing individual enterprises but also on changing state policy. In his opinion, Ukraine needs to move from situational decisions to a long-term strategy that would provide for the development of private defense companies, the localization of critical components, and cooperation with European and American manufacturers.
True independence is not only a final break with moscow, but also a rejection of the role of an eternal supplicant with an outstretched hand before Western partners. We need our own agency: an aggressive focus on private defense tech, a rigorous review of the ineffective state sector, rapid localization of critical components, and parity-based integration into European and American production chains as an equal partner hardened by a major war
Fire Point could become one example of such development. Anton Zemlyanyi, a senior analyst at the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, suggests that the company could become the foundation for further development of Ukraine's missile program and the creation of an entire family of ballistic missiles. He noted that the company is gradually expanding its areas of work—from drones and cruise missiles to ballistic weapons.
International cooperation could play a special role. Anton Zemlyanyi notes that Fire Point's plans to establish joint ventures with European manufacturers could help scale up production, attract partners, and reduce the risks of Russian strikes on production facilities. In the future, this could also open up new opportunities for integrating Ukrainian developments into European defense programs.
However, in the analyst's opinion, Ukraine should not build its missile program around a single manufacturer alone.
I would also not rule out other manufacturers, including state-owned ones. It is in Ukraine's interests to have several capable producers of missile weapons rather than depend exclusively on a single private company. This would create a broader production base, strengthen competition, and reduce risks for the missile program as a whole
Ivan Stupak emphasizes that the main lesson of previous decades is the need to invest continuously in one's own defense industry rather than remember it only when the country finds itself facing a large-scale military threat.
If you do not finance your own army, you will then have to stand for a year asking other countries for help. And there may not be another opportunity to do so