Why Ukraine's New Cruise Missile Is Actually Kind Of A Big Deal

Not a Wunderwaffen, just a very potent weapon

Originally fitted with a bright pink tip in test models, the Flamingo is now a big, ugly, fat fu*ker (BUFF) of a flying bomb in more warlike paint

The long-range war has been an occasional focus of this website since 2023, when Ukraine began their deep-strike campaign with a spectacular, though ineffective, attack on the Kremlin. More an announcement than an attack, it was spectacular because Ukraine had managed to repurpose cheap flight technology to send explosives a very great distance. It was ineffective because the drone could only carry a small payload.

Until now, this has been the general problem for Ukrainian long-range weapons: they have managed to achieve impressive accuracy at great distances, but only with relatively small explosions at the end. A civilian plane converted into a drone bomb can destroy an oil storage tank, for example, but not a whole weapons factory. Flamingo, the new Ukrainian flying bomb built by a startup called Fire Point, drastically raises the destructive efficiency of an individual strike.

Moreover, Ukraine has spent two years systematically unravelling Russian air defenses, created huge gaps to exploit, before introducing this absolute unit. According to Volodmyr Zelenskyy, Flamingo is already “the most successful missile we have.” Zelenskyy told Ukrinform that production is being scaled up. “By December, we will have more of them. And by the end of December or in January-February, mass production should begin,” he said. Huge, if true. Maybe even game-changing. We don’t use those words around here very often.

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Ukraine Reveals The S-200 Missiles That Make Russian Pilots Keep Their Distance

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