“Weeks, Not Months”: Ukraine’s FP-7 Ballistic Missile Nears Battlefield Debut

Ukrainian defense company Fire Point has moved its FP-7 ballistic missile into military trials after successfully completing two earlier stages of testing, bringing the weapon potentially within weeks of operational use.

Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh announced the milestone on the sidelines of the Photonics4Defense 2026: Technology Exchange & Matchmaking event, according to a UNITED24 Media correspondent on September 10.

According to Terekh, the FP-7 has already passed its first two testing phases and is now undergoing military evaluation, which is also part of the missile’s formal codification process.

The earlier stages included ground and laboratory testing, during which individual systems and subsystems were evaluated separately, including the rocket engine and navigation equipment.

“We are erasing the deep rear doctrine from the Russian military vocabulary,” said Terekh.

Flight testing followed, allowing engineers to collect data on the missile’s behavior in the air and determine how closely its actual performance matched design calculations.

The FP-7 has now advanced beyond those stages.

“We’re talking weeks, not months,” Terekh said when asked how soon the missile could move toward operational use.

Fire Point is simultaneously developing the longer-range FP-9 ballistic missile, which is currently undergoing flight testing and remains one stage behind the FP-7.

Testing the FP-9 presents a very different challenge because of its greater range.

According to the developers, the missile has a minimum distance required for ballistic flight. Once it passes a certain point in its trajectory, the test can no longer simply be terminated through software.

That makes conducting a complete test entirely within Ukrainian territory difficult.

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As a result, once the current flight-testing phase is completed, the FP-9 could potentially move from testing into military evaluation through actual employment against Russian targets rather than following the same conventional test sequence as the shorter-range FP-7.

Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed hope that the US will support implementing the FREYJA anti-ballistic missile program, with the interceptor missile being built based on the Fire Point FP-7 ballistic missile.

“We are preparing our own FREYJA program. We very much hope that the Americans will support this program as well. But nevertheless, with the Europeans we will definitely achieve the desired result,” Zelenskyy said.

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