From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / October 29, 2025
October 28, 2025
In Kyiv, Zelensky announced Ukraine’s Flamingo and Ruta missiles struck Russian targets for the first time. In Pokrovsk, Russian forces infiltrated the semi-encircled city, trapping 1,200 civilians under fire control. In Brussels, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán moved to resurrect an anti-Ukraine bloc with Slovakia and Czechia. The war’s industrial future and tactical present collided—one nation building weapons while losing cities.
The Day’s Reckoning
The closed briefing room in Kyiv held an unusual electricity that autumn morning. President Volodymyr Zelensky, choosing his words with the precision of a man revealing secrets he’d rather keep, confirmed what intelligence analysts had whispered for weeks: Ukraine’s own missiles—domestically forged, Ukrainian-engineered, born from necessity’s crucible—had struck Russian targets.
Flamingo and Ruta. Names almost whimsical for instruments of strategic violence.
“We are doing everything we can to ensure that this year we try not just one, two, or three, but to make a serious attempt to do more.” The understatement was characteristic. The implication profound.
A nation that had spent nearly three years with outstretched hands—pleading for Storm Shadows, rationing HIMARS strikes, counting each Javelin as precious—had crossed an invisible threshold. Ukraine was no longer merely a battlefield where Western and Russian military technologies clashed by proxy. It had become a weapons producer. And soon, Zelensky would announce, a weapons exporter.
But even as Ukraine’s industrial capacity flowered in ways unimaginable in February 2022, the war’s oldest truths reasserted themselves with brutal clarity.
In Pokrovsk, 600 kilometers to the east, Russian forces outnumbered Ukrainian defenders eight-to-one, infiltrating a city they’d nearly encircled, trapping 1,200 civilians under fire control that killed anyone attempting escape. German journalists documenting Ukrainian air defense crews watched the soldier they’d just interviewed die in a Russian Lancet strike. Corruption investigators pursued both drone manufacturers and former energy chiefs, suggesting the rot that had weakened Ukraine before the invasion hadn’t been wholly purged by existential crisis. In Brussels, Viktor Orbán maneuvered to resurrect an anti-Ukraine coalition from the fragments of the old Visegrad alliance. And across European skies—over Estonian military bases, Spanish airports—unidentified drones appeared and disappeared like digital ghosts, harbingers of a hybrid war that respected no borders.
October 28 offered no singular narrative, no clear trajectory toward victory or defeat.
Instead, these 24 hours presented a mosaic of modern warfare’s complexity: industrial innovation shadowed by institutional decay, tactical desperation offset by strategic adaptation, alliance solidarity fractured by political opportunism, all playing out simultaneously across geography and domain. The question wasn’t whether Ukraine could produce missiles—it demonstrably could. The question was whether it could produce them honestly, deploy them effectively, maintain the political coalitions sustaining the war effort, protect those defending the nation, hold territory against overwhelming force, and counter hybrid threats that respected no distinction between war and peace, front and rear, military and civilian.
The machinery of war, it turned out, extended far beyond munitions factories.
Ukraine’s Arsenal, Ukraine’s Shadow
The briefing room in Kyiv. Zelensky choosing each word with surgical precision. Ukraine’s own missiles—Flamingo and Ruta, names almost whimsical for instruments of war—had struck Russian targets.
Where? He wouldn’t say. When? Classified. What damage? Operational secret.
The silence was strategic. Russian air defense planners couldn’t adapt to patterns they couldn’t identify. Moscow’s defensive perimeter suddenly became uncertain—which rear targets were now vulnerable to Ukrainian weapons unconstrained by Western political sensitivities?
Voice of Ukraine 