Ukraine conducts record drone strike of 2,500km after 12-hour flight — $55,000 unit made of plywood halts operations at Russia’s largest gasoline producer

Ukrainian FP-1 drones struck the Gazprom Neft oil refinery in Omsk, Siberia, on July 6 after flying roughly 2,500 km over more than 12 hours, halting operations at Russia’s largest gasoline producer, according to a report from UK pub The Telegraph. It was the longest-range Ukrainian drone strike of the war, carried out by an aircraft built around a plywood load-bearing structure, foam wings, and a two-cylinder piston engine, at an estimated cost of $55,000 per unit.

Despite its lightweight structure, the drone managed to cause some pretty severe damage, setting fire to the CDU-10 crude distillation unit per Reuters, which handles 24,580 metric tons of crude per day and accounts for around 38% of the plant’s processing capacity. A second unit, CDU-11, responsible for a further 37%, was shut down after network links vital to its operation were damaged. The refinery, which processed 22 million metric tons of crude (about 440,000 barrels per day) in 2024, stopped selling gasoline and diesel on the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange the following day.

The FP-1, built by Kyiv-based Fire Point, is engineered not for sophistication or as cutting-edge drone tech, but for mass production. The airframe uses plywood structural elements and foam wings skinned in fiberglass or carbon fiber, with a twin-boom layout, a roughly five-meter wingspan, and no landing gear. A solid rocket booster launches it from a fixed platform or a truck, and a two-cylinder engine driving a propeller carries it the rest of the way.

The drone’s original design range was 1,600 km with a warhead of up to 60 kg. At the Eurosatory defense exhibition in Paris last month, Fire Point showed an upgraded FP-1 with an additional fuel tank integrated into the wing, extending its range to 2,700 km. That variant put Omsk, and most of Russia’s refining capacity, within reach. The Telegraph reported that the drones used in the strike were lightened, with lengthened wingspans and enlarged fuel tanks, and that Fire Point co-founder Denys Shtilerman said Ukrainian planners spent more than a week plotting a route around Russian air defenses. Navigation relies on a purpose-built algorithm designed to resist GPS spoofing, with inertial and satellite guidance layered together.

Fire Point produces around 100 FP-1s per day, and the aircraft now accounts for roughly 60% of Ukraine’s deep strikes inside Russia, according to company CEO Iryna Terekh. Each drone costs less than a single interceptor missile fired by the multimillion-dollar S-400 and Pantsir batteries tasked with stopping it, and Russia simply can’t field enough of those systems to cover a country spanning 11 time zones.

This design takes advantage of Russia’s air defense network, which was designed to detect fast, high-flying jets and ballistic missiles, not slow, low-altitude aircraft with small radar signatures. Moscow scrambled Su-57 stealth fighters against the Omsk raid, but several drones still got through. Kyle Glen, an open-source investigator, told The Telegraph that Russia appears to concentrate its defenses around Moscow and St. Petersburg, leaving “almost nothing behind it to stop them” once drones penetrate the outer layer.

Ukraine’s General Staff recorded 172 deep strikes last month, up from 85 in February, and Omsk was the sixth major Russian refinery forced to fully or partially shut down since the start of June. Last month, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a new Fire Point drone can reach targets at 3,000 km, and the company’s FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, carrying a 1,150 kg warhead over the same distance, has begun striking Russian weapons facilities as air defenses thin out.