Aug 4 (Reuters) - Ukrainian drone and missile maker Fire Point has secured agreements from over a dozen European defence companies to provide radar, guidance and other systems for the Freyja missile defence project, and is starting to integrate the various systems, its CEO has said.
Ukraine had urgently sought partners to develop a weapon capable of stopping Russia's ballistic missiles. The pan-European project was launched officially in Paris last month by 10 governments and 12 defence firms - including
Eurosam, Leonardo, Thales and SAAB.
Kyiv currently relies on the U.S.-made Patriot system to down ballistic missiles that fly at several times the speed of sound, but global shortages of its interceptor missiles, exacerbated by the war in Iran, have left Ukraine exposed.
"Pretty much everything is agreed," CEO Iryna Terekh told Reuters, saying 13 industrial partners had already joined. Fire Point aims to achieve its first successful interception by mid-2027, she added.
UKRAINE'S FIRE POINT BUILDS PAN-EUROPEAN FREYJA MISSILE
The Ukrainian company is providing the FP7.X – a faster version of its FP7 ballistic missile – as the interceptor and is now integrating that with the guidance system, known as a seeker, Terekh said:
"Right now we are in the most intense and also in the most complicated stage of finally assembling everything together with surveillance radars, with tracking radars, with the seekers."
Norway's Kongsberg is working on the command centre integrating the various systems. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Industry publications have reported that Germany's Diehl Defence - which produces a seeker for its own IRIS-T air defence system - will provide the guidance system.
A Diehl spokesperson confirmed the firm was in talks with Fire Point but declined to discuss details. Terekh declined to comment.
Fire Point aims to produce a ballistic interceptor for less than €1 million ($1.2 million) per missile, Terekh said - a quarter to a sixth of the cost of a Patriot.
"We're trying to squeeze a program that usually takes 20 or 30 years into a matter of a couple of years," Terekh said, adding that there had been at least five tests of the interceptor missile.
The project would use open-source architecture and allow different options to swapped in and out - such as a Weibel radar for one made by Saab, according to Ukrainian officials.
The number of industrial partners could rise to around 20, which would increase production capacity, Terekh said. She added Fire Point was in talks with Ukrainian state-owned missile makers, but declined to name them.
Terekh said the participating companies would finance research and development until a minimum viable product (MVP) was reached - which she said would mean the successful interception of a ballistic missile.
ATTACK MISSILES NEARLY READY FOR COMBAT
"We expect the launcher to have from four to six missiles. So if from one batch there was an interception of a ballistic missile for MVP, this would be a wonderful result," Terekh said.
A missile gets through only if all the interceptors in a launcher miss. Keeping the probability of six misses in a row below 5% - an industry standard - requires each interceptor to hit roughly 40% of the time, according to Fabian Hoffmann, missile expert at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies.
If it could really be done for €1 million, it would be "pretty impressive", and "very cheap", Hoffmann said.
The FP7 missile has an attack variant that can be used to strike ground targets. This has undergone about 15 test launches and is now being certified by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry, which she expected to take two to four more weeks.
Fire Point aims for first combat use of this version in early autumn, and late autumn for the much larger FP9 ballistic missile, which it says will be able to reach Moscow.
Terekh said the FP7's architecture was based on Soviet-era designs for the S300 and S400 interceptors, but that Fire Point's missile now shared only 20% similarity with those weapons.
In a recent interview, Fire Point co-founder Denys Shtilierman said the Soviet plans had been procured as a favour by Timur Mindich, a former business associate of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy who faces charges of corruption and is now a fugitive in Israel.
Fire Point says it declined an offer from Mindich to buy a stake in the company.
Fire Point is pressing ahead with building its own engine for its FP5 cruise missile, known as the Flamingo, which has hit several prominent military targets in Russia this year.
It had been using second-hand jet engines - "digging through the cemetery of the engines ... like in a thrift store," Terekh said.
But these are getting harder and harder to find, so Fire Point is assembling the first 10 units of its own prototype.
"As soon as we're happy with the results of tests of these test engines, there'll definitely be many more Flamingos," Terekh said.
($1 = 0.8678 euros)
(Editing by Kevin Liffey)
