Ukraine's armed forces may have attempted to strike an industrial facility in Novy Urengoy, a Russian city about 3,200 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, using modernized FP-1 drones, according to the American military affairs outlet The War Zone (TWZ).
TWZ said it based its assessment on a post by Denis Shtilerman, founder of the Ukrainian drone manufacturer Fire Point, on the social media platform X. Shtilerman hinted that the munition involved in the attempted strike on Novy Urengoy had flown 3,200 kilometers, the outlet reported.
The outlet noted that Fire Point had previously said its FP-1 drone, after modernization, would be able to travel as far as 3,400 kilometers while carrying a 60-kilogram warhead.
No confirmation of the weapon used
TWZ said that despite Fire Point's suggestive hints, there was no confirmation that the company's weapon had any connection to the attack. The outlet added that the strike could also have been carried out using a different system, or even launched from within Russia itself.
Even so, TWZ said a strike launched from inside Russian territory was far less likely than one launched from Ukraine, given Fire Point's apparent involvement in the incident.
What happened in Novy Urengoy
Dmitry Artyukhov, governor of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, said earlier that an attack by Ukraine's armed forces on an industrial facility in Novy Urengoy had been repelled. Novy Urengoy sits in Russia's Arctic north and is one of the country's major natural gas production hubs, thousands of kilometers from the front line in Ukraine.
Fire Point's expanding arsenal
Fire Point is a Ukrainian drone and missile manufacturer whose weapons Kyiv has increasingly used for long-range strikes inside Russia. In August, Fire Point chief executive Irina Terekh said the company's FP-7 ballistic missile, which Ukraine's armed forces plan to use for strikes on Russian territory, would be combat-ready by the end of September.
