Ukraine completes work on new missile defense system, awaits European partner components

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has completed its share of Freyja, the multinational antiballistic shield that Europe and Kyiv are racing to bring together, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said earlier this month, putting the onus on partner countries and their defense contractors to develop the interceptor’s remaining components fast enough to conduct initial tests by year’s end. 

Fire Point, the Ukrainian company leading the project, is building the FP-7.X interceptor and its launcher while partners such as Norway’s Kongsberg and Germany’s Diehl Defence are responsible for developing parts that find, track and guide the missile to its target.

“Ukraine has done what it was supposed to do, and that is good news,” Zelenskyy told journalists Oct. 17. “As for what the partners are supposed to do, you know that there are ten participating countries, and they are in the process.”

The push comes as Ukraine runs short of costly Patriot interceptors and Russia fields faster weapons, including jet-powered Shahed drones, forcing Kyiv to spend scarce antiballistics on both drones and increasingly large missile barrages. 

Russia has fired more than 100 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region in the past two weeks after launching nearly 3,500 jet-powered drones across Ukraine in September, Zelenskyy said, quoting air force figures. 

Civilian casualties from January through September ran 59% higher than a year earlier, according to the U.N.

“People work on systems like this for decades. We want it very fast, because there is no time,” Zelenskyy said about the new antiballistic system.

Freyja is designed to end Kyiv’s dependence on the Patriot and provide Europe with its own antiballistic capability. However, now that Ukraine has delivered the system’s base elements, one of the program’s most demanding phases – fitting European sensors, seekers and fire-control systems to a Ukrainian interceptor – hinges on partners’ pace of development. 

Fire Point had already begun “the most intense and also the most complicated stage” of final assembly with specially designed radars and seekers from other countries, capping an overall effort to “squeeze a [antiballistics development] program that usually takes 20 or 30 years into a matter of a couple of years,” chief executive Iryna Terekh said in August. 

Ukrainian officials consider the Patriot their only reliable defense against ballistic missiles, but the U.S.-Israel war with Iran has drained an estimated two-thirds of America’s prewar PAC-3 interceptor stock.

The missiles are also expensive and slow to arrive. A PAC-3 interceptor costs roughly $3.8 million, takes years to deliver, and can get held up in licensing talks or delivery issues.

Fire Point unveiled Freyja in May to end that dependence, offering Kyiv and its allies an interceptor they can build and deploy independently.

Ukraine and nine European partners, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, officially launched Freyja’s coalition in Paris on July 13.

“Europeans themselves will be able to decide how many systems Europe needs and where they should be deployed,” Zelenskyy said at the launch. Poland joined the cohort in September, and Canada is “ready to contribute its technologies,” Zelenskyy said after meeting Prime Minister Mark Carney Sept. 10, according to the presidential office.

Under a June agreement with Germany’s Hensoldt, Fire Point is the prime contractor and design authority, and Hensoldt supplies the radars, such as the TRML-4D, which the company says can track roughly 1,500 air targets.

A preliminary design shared by Fire Point co-founder Denys Shtilerman on X in May pairs the FP-7.X with a long-range radar from Sweden’s Saab, France’s Thales or Hensoldt, a fire-control radar from Denmark’s Weibel or Italy’s Leonardo, and a command center from Kongsberg, maker of the NASAMS systems Ukraine already uses.

The system would tie into Ukraine’s wider air-defense network over NATO’s Link 16 standard, connect its radars through the Asterix protocol and use a two-way data link to correct the interceptor’s course in flight, according to the slides. 

European partners will supply that data link and the command center, Reuters reported in June. Most of the system’s components are designed to be interchangeable.

The system’s seeker remains the bottleneck, Terekh told The War Zone, adding that Fire Point is integrating Diehl’s infrared seeker and developing other options with two unnamed partners.

“If we look at everything but the seeker, our production is already ready, even for mass production,” she said. “Even the seeker manufacturers are doing this for the first time in such an integration.”

The first FP-7.X will use a blast-fragmentation warhead, closer to the older PAC-2 than the hit-to-kill PAC-3, and intercept at roughly 12 to 16 miles (20 to 25 kilometers) up, Terekh told Janes in July. A hit-to-kill version will follow.

Fire Point aims to produce at least 2,000 interceptors a year for under $1.2 million (€1 million) each, though Terekh said that price would come “probably not from the first iterations, but definitely in serial production.”

Frejya’s next technical milestones depend on European partners.

“If, for example, every European government starts moving swiftly, we can do interceptors by the end of this year,” Fire Point’s Shtilerman said. The company is aiming for battlefield use next July.

In Oslo last week, Zelenskyy, Norwegian Defense Minister Tore Sandvik and Kongsberg chief executive Eirik Lie identified where work “can and must be accelerated to begin testing by the end of this year,” Ukraine’s presidential office reported.

“Fortunately for Europe and for Ukraine itself, we have Fire Point,” EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said Oct. 17, according to UNN, adding that its work on ballistic missiles and Freyja “could become a huge change.”