Former Architect Leads Ukraine's Long-Range Weapons Boom as Fire Point Prepares Ballistic Missile Arsenal

In a defense manufacturing landscape traditionally dominated by seasoned military engineers and heavy industrial veterans, Iryna Terekh represents a profound shift in Ukraine's wartime transformation. The 34-year-old chief executive officer of Fire Point, now one of the country's most prominent arms manufacturers, oversees the mass production of long-range attack drones and advanced missile systems while maintaining an executive style that distinctly contrasts with the traditional defense sector.

Inside the bustling production facilities in Kyiv, Terekh commands an operation staffed by young executives and assistants operating alongside factory workers handling heavy power tools, moving structural components, and assembling complex aerial hardware. Her presence reflects the broader reality across Ukraine, where citizens from purely civilian backgrounds have had to rapidly repurpose their commercial talents to sustain national defense efforts following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, Terekh built a successful career rooted in architecture, design, and structural project management. Working out of the northern city of Irpin, near Kyiv, she specialized in designing urban spaces, residential patios, and custom outdoor furniture, while simultaneously running an enterprise focused on high-performance concrete manufacturing. These ventures provided her with extensive expertise in fabrication processes, material logistics, and operational oversight.

The trajectory of her life changed drastically during the initial weeks of the 2022 invasion when Russian forces advanced into Irpin. The subsequent occupation resulted in the destruction of roughly 70 percent of the city’s residential and municipal infrastructure. The devastation witnessed firsthand forced Terekh to flee her home and compelled her to re-evaluate how her technical background could serve a vital strategic purpose.

Confronted with the stark reality of modern warfare and the acute vulnerabilities facing Ukrainian population centers, Terekh resolved to redirect her organizational and manufacturing expertise into defense production. She recognized that the skills honed in civilian construction and design could be directly translated into managing the complex assembly lines needed to produce precision strike capabilities.

The impetus to build long-range strike systems intensified significantly in the autumn of 2022. During this period, Russian forces began launching routine barrages of Iranian-engineered Shahed loitering munitions against Ukrainian power grids and civilian infrastructure, while also establishing domestic production lines for their own variants, known as Gerans. The urgent need to deliver a reciprocal deterrent prompted Ukrainian innovators to pursue domestic alternatives.

To meet this challenge, Terekh partnered with Ukrainian businessman Denys Shtilerman, a former collaborator from her pre-war urban architecture projects who brought formal defense engineering expertise to the initiative. Together with a third co-founder, former film producer Yehor Skalyha, they established Fire Point, assembling an agile team characterized largely by creative and non-traditional technical backgrounds.

The nascent company initially concentrated its efforts on developing the FP-1 attack drone, establishing a modest production goal of delivering approximately 20 airframes per month. The primary objective was to furnish Ukrainian armed forces with reliable, low-cost unmanned systems capable of traveling deep into rear staging areas to disrupt opposing logistics.

By 2024, Fire Point’s FP-1 platforms had become integral components of Ukraine’s deep-strike strategy. The long-range munitions were deployed systematically against high-value strategic targets located well inside Russian territory, including military airfields, forward ammunition depots, and critical oil refining infrastructure that supported combat operations.

Over the subsequent two years, Fire Point underwent an extraordinary industrial expansion, evolving from an experimental workshop into a manufacturing powerhouse. Today, the company produces between 300 and 400 long-range attack drones every single day, demonstrating an ability to scale military hardware at a pace rarely seen in modern defense industrial bases.

Beyond its prolific drone output, Fire Point has progressively expanded into far more complex guided weaponry. In June, a Fire Point-manufactured cruise missile successfully executed a combat mission that covered a distance of more than 1,000 miles, an operational benchmark that Terekh identified as the longest-distance combat strike ever achieved by a cruise missile in military history.

This rapid expansion has substantially altered the cross-border dynamic. According to Terekh, Ukrainian forces conducted twice as many deep-strike operations into Russian territory as Russian forces launched into Ukraine during 2026, with Fire Point hardware accounting for an estimated 60 percent of those Ukrainian strikes.

Building on these operational milestones, the company is now nearing the completion of its most ambitious project to date: the deployment of Ukraine’s first entirely domestic ballistic missile. Unlike low-altitude cruise missiles, ballistic weapons fly on high-arcing trajectories at extreme speeds, making them exceptionally difficult for conventional air defense batteries to intercept and significantly broadening Kyiv's retaliatory envelope.

Terekh indicated that this homegrown ballistic missile system is only months away from active combat deployment, a development expected to bring vital strategic nodes, including Moscow, into direct operational range. The rapid maturation of Fire Point underscores how civilian adaptability and agile domestic manufacturing continue to redefine Ukraine's long-term military self-reliance.