Fire Point CEO Terekh said Flamingo cruise missile is more of "political statement". Honcharenko criticized her remarks. VIDEO
Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh said the company did not plan to continue producing Flamingo cruise missiles, calling them a "political statement".
She made the remarks during a podcast on the UT-2 YouTube channel released on July 20. MP Oleksii Honcharenko shared a clip on social media, Censor.NET reports.
What did Terekh say at the time?
"There won’t be any; at least as of today, we have no plans for any more cruise missiles. I can explain why. We made the most of the circumstances we were working in. We started developing ballistic missiles before the cruise missile, but that is an iterative process, a complex one that takes time. And we decided: ‘While we’re working on that, let’s make something simpler, something we already understand better and have more experience with.’ That is how Flamingo came about. I think it was far more important as a political statement than as some kind of ‘super-duper wonder weapon’. We never counted on it being a ‘super-duper wonder weapon’. We counted on it showing our enemy that we can reach them where they do not expect us. And it is doing that job very well," the Fire Point CEO said.
Honcharenko’s reaction
Commenting on Terekh’s remarks, MP Honcharenko expressed outrage that companies with no experience in missile manufacturing were receiving government contracts, while the capabilities of specialist enterprises such as the Luch Design Bureau and Pivdenmash were not being used.
"Let’s think about it. Purely theoretically, if Russia were conducting an operation against Ukraine, how exactly would they do it? 1. Perhaps they would find people who had never spent a single day working in missile manufacturing and set up a missile manufacturing company. 2. Perhaps they would find friends who successfully lobbied for this company in the Presidential Office and ended up on NABU recordings. 3. Perhaps they would then award all government contracts to this company. Not to the Luch Design Bureau, Pivdenmash or other factories with many years of successful experience. 4. Perhaps everyone would hear that this company’s missiles are actually a political statement. And where the real missiles are, well, that is still not very clear. Think about it," the lawmaker wrote.
