Ukraine’s cruise missile hits Russian military plant in Kirov

Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile has struck deep inside Russia again, this time hitting a defense plant that builds the ejection seats meant to save the lives of Russian fighter pilots and the anti-aircraft missiles meant to shoot down Ukrainian drones.

Ukrainian forces attacked the Avitek plant in the Russian city of Kirov early Friday morning with an FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, Militarnyi reported, citing the OSINT monitoring community Exilenova+. Denys Shtilerman, co-owner and chief designer at Fire Point, the Ukrainian company that builds the Flamingo, confirmed the missile’s use in a post on X and later published video of the launch.

Explosions rang out across Kirov at around seven in the morning local time, and residents in the area reported seeing smoke rising near the plant, filming the aftermath on their phones as the strike’s effects became visible across the city. Multiple independent Russian and Ukrainian outlets, including Radio Svoboda and Dialog.UA, corroborated the strike within the hour, with Russian investigative outlet Astra confirming the Avitek facility was burning and specifically producing air defense missiles for the Russian military.

The facility, formally known as the Vyatka Machine-Building Enterprise Avitek, belongs to Almaz-Antey, the state-owned conglomerate that serves as the backbone of Russia’s air defense industry, building everything from the S-400 missile system down to the guided anti-aircraft weapons Russia deploys against Ukrainian drones and aircraft. Avitek specializes in aviation equipment and pilot rescue systems, including ejection seats that would save a Russian pilot’s life if their aircraft went down in combat, and the plant also manufactures guided surface-to-air missiles, target missiles used for training exercises, and decoy systems designed to simulate aerial targets for radar and air defense testing. The facility has operated under this name since being absorbed into Almaz-Antey in 2002, tracing its roots back to a Soviet-era factory built during the 20th Communist Party Congress era, and it currently sits under international sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, Ukraine, Canada, Switzerland and New Zealand specifically over its role supplying components to Russia’s military-industrial complex.

This strike extends a pattern The Defence Blog has tracked closely as Fire Point’s Flamingo missile has emerged as one of Ukraine’s most consequential long-range weapons of the war. The FP-5 Flamingo is a Ukrainian-built cruise missile that measures up to 14 meters (46 ft) long with a 6-meter (20 ft) wingspan, weighs roughly 6,000 kg (13,228 lb), and carries a massive 1,150 kg (2,535 lb) warhead out to a range of 3,000 km (1,864 miles), putting it among the largest cruise missiles of its type anywhere in the world.

Since that public debut, Flamingo strikes have steadily worked their way deeper into Russia’s defense-industrial base. Ukrainian forces used the missile to hit the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary in June, a facility producing anti-jamming satellite navigation components for Shahed drones and guided bombs, in what was the second strike on that same site within five weeks. Later that same month, Flamingo missiles struck the Titan-Barrikady plant in Volgograd, a facility tied to Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos that manufactures launch systems for Russia’s strategic missile forces, with at least three confirmed hits and ten people reported injured according to regional Governor Andrey Bocharov. Friday’s strike on Avitek follows that same trajectory, targeting a facility whose output directly touches both the offensive missiles Russia fires and the defensive systems meant to protect Russian aircrews.

Kirov sits roughly 900 km (560 miles) from the nearest point on Ukraine’s border, a distance that underscores just how far Flamingo’s stated 3,000 km range extends Ukraine’s ability to reach targets Russian air defenses previously treated as safely out of range. That kind of reach forces Russian military planners to reconsider which of their defense-industrial facilities, however far from the front line, can now be considered genuinely secure, and it adds Avitek to a growing list of Almaz-Antey-linked sites that Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign has already touched this year.