Ukrainian air strikes have damaged a key hub for Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles over the past month, officials say, damaging a hangar and other infrastructure.
The General Staff wrote in a Feb. 5 post on Telegram that the Armed Forces of Ukraine had inflicted a series of strikes on the Kapustin Yar airfield in Russia’s Astrakhan Oblast over the course of January.
“Based on current information, on the territory of the testing ground a part of the buildings have taken on various degrees of damage, one of the hangars was significantly damaged, and part of the personnel was evacuated from the territory,” the post reads.
What is Russia’s Oreshnik?
Kapustin Yar is a Soviet-built airfield that has long served as hub for Russia’s ballistic missile program.
The Oreshnik is a much-ballyhooed intermediate-range ballistic missile that seems to be a modification of the surface-to-surface Rubezh missile, itself a modification of various ballistic weapons designed by the Soviet Union.
Russia first used an Oreshnik in Ukraine on the city of Dnipro in Nov. 2024. As far as public information goes, Russia most recently used an Oreshnik to hit Lviv Oblast in Western Ukraine on Jan. 9. It remains a largely experimental weapon, with Russia’s stockpiles the subject of much speculation, though certainly limited.
Russia’s rare deployments of Oreshniks typically accentuate political statements. British intelligence referred to the Lviv strike as retaliation for alleged Ukrainian attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence, and that Russia “highly likely only has a handful of Oreshnik missiles.”
What is Ukraine’s Flamingo?
The General Staff attributed Ukraine’s January strikes to “using long-range strike weapons of Ukrainian production, particularly the FP-5 ‘Flamingo.'”
The Flamingo is a cruise missile advertised as having a distance of some 3,000 kilometers, capable of carrying a 1,000 kilogram warhead, and being manufactured within Ukraine at a rate of up to eight daily. Fire Point, the missile maker, said in August that the missile was already in mass production.
The General Staff has noted a handful of strikes on Russian-held territory as being the work of the Flamingo. Fire Point has also been a major recipient of funding from European benefactors, and is currently trying to kick off production of its own rocket fuel at a plant in Denmark.
Evidence of successful strikes have been relatively scarce, however, leaving manufacturer Fire Point under persistent scrutiny. As the Kyiv Independent first reported, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine was investigating Fire Point when President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to pass legislation that would put the bureau under the control of his appointed prosecutor general.
