Flamingo missile

Left: The UK/Ukraine 'Flamingo'; Right: The German V-1 "buzz bomb" with launcher arrived too late with certain vulnerabilities to make a difference. It's design decades later was the prototype for American Predator drone and others.

The FP-5 Flamingo missile is built around the Ivchenko AI-25 turbo-fan jet engine, which had been developed in the 1950s by the Ivchenko Design Bureau in the Soviet Union, and produced at the Motor Sich aircraft factory in Zaparozhia, the Flamingo was a derivative of the Soviet-era Tu-141and Tu-143 reconnaissance drones, which had been repurposed by Ukraine into ground-attack cruise missiles.

The Flamingo made its debut at the international defense industry exhibition IDEX-2025, which took place from February 17 to 21, 2025 in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, when the Emirati-British Milanion Defense Industry Group unveiled a prototype missile.

Fire Point, the company which oversees the manufacture of the FP-5 Flamingo, is little more than a shell company. Fire Point has opened a Flamingo production facility in Denmark, near Skrydstrup Air Base and the town of Vojens in Southern Jutland, that will produce solid rocket propellant used to boost the FP-5 into flight during ground operations. The FP-5 Flamingo is exactly what it portends to be—a British-made weapon designed to get around the legalities, and consequences, of Russian red lines regarding the use of long-range missiles based in Ukraine against Russia targets.

Built around the Ivchenko AI-25 turbo-fan jet engine, which had been developed in the 1950s by the Ivchenko Design Bureau in the Soviet Union, and produced at the Motor Sich aircraft factory in Zaparozhia, the Flamingo was a derivative of the Soviet-era Tu-141and Tu-143 reconnaissance drones, which had been repurposed by Ukraine into ground-attack cruise missiles. The warhead appeared to be based upon Ukrainian gravity bombs. The goal behind the Milanion design was to provide Ukraine with an affordable indigenous long-range strike capability which bypassed the Russian restrictions on foreign weapons.

In 2025 the UK began unloading its stockpile on Ukraine. The Flamingo is shipped to Ukraine in parts, and reassembled as a "Ukrainian produced" weapon. The Flamingo is part of a larger money laundering scheme investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the FBI under the name "Operation Midas" involving Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky and personnel close to him.