AINEWS
A Sky News correspondent tours a 24/7 facility producing the FP 1, a Ukrainian long range strike drone with a manufacturer claimed 3,000 km reach, and the distributed workshops around it.
Russia has spent the war hitting Ukrainian military and industrial sites: depots, factories, power stations. Ukraine's answer, as documented in a recent Sky News feature by correspondent Stuart Ramsay, is to stop producing in places Russia can hit. Long-range strike drones are now built underground and spread across a network of small workshops, basements, and repurposed Soviet infrastructure.
A welder, a robotics engineer, and a carpenter share a shift in one of those spaces. The location is classified. The work is not: assemble long-range strike drones, around the clock, in a facility that can produce more than 200 finished drones a day.
The platform at the center is the FP-1, a long-range Ukrainian strike UAV made by Fire Point). Fire Point claims a reach of up to 3,000 kilometers, a figure that would put most of European Russia inside its envelope. That range is a vendor claim, not an independently verified one, and both the Wikipedia entry and the Sky News package treat it as such. It is also the number most likely to be repeated without context.
The single 24/7 facility is the visible part of the system. The less visible part is the "garage production" layer the Sky News report describes: a distributed set of small civilian workshops feeding subassemblies and components into the network. Dispersal is the design. A 200-drones-a-day headline belongs to one site. The industrial logic belongs to a network that, in theory, can lose individual nodes without collapsing.
The model has critics. Retired Russian Col. Mikhail Timoshenko told NEWS.ru that the network is technically feasible but questioned whether the scale presented in some publications matches reality, re-reported in the TASS cluster that echoes the original Sky News framing. Timoshenko's point cuts at the central claim: a garage model buys dispersal and redundancy, but it also constrains quality control, supply-chain integration, and the throughput needed to hit a six-figure annual target.
Fire Point has stated a target of more than 100,000 FP-1 and FP-2 drones in 2026, per Aerospace Global News coverage. That is an ambition, not a confirmed delivery number. The same Aerospace Global News report frames it against the company's broader positioning) as a domestic UAV producer.
The model trades visibility for survivability. Russia can bomb a factory. It cannot easily bomb a network of basements, garages, and Soviet tunnels spread across a country whose terrain and infrastructure Russia does not fully control. The cost is fragmentation and the constant risk of a quality or integration failure no press tour can document.
Fire Point's 2026 target is 100,000 FP-1 and FP-2 drones. The single 24/7 facility shown on camera produces 200 a day. The network between those two numbers is what the next year of production has to build.