Volodymyr Zelensky announced it in five short lines: “FP-7. First combat use. Thank you for the result. Next up: production. Glory to Ukraine!” On October 1, Ukraine fired its first homemade ballistic missile in combat. Kyiv will not say what it hit. The missile carries a 200-kilogram warhead , and its maker, the Kyiv firm Fire Point, puts its maximum range at 300 kilometers. A longer-range version is promised before the year is out. Its heavier sibling, the FP-9 , is designed to fly 850 kilometers.

Fire Point’s chief executive, Iryna Terekh , described the point of the exercise without diplomatic padding. Ukraine, she said, had joined the operators of ballistic missiles “with no kill switch,” and “we don’t have to ask now anybody if we want to conduct self-defense.”

Russia answered with bridges. From Thursday to Sunday, drones struck Kyiv’s crossings over the Dnipro, hitting the Southern and Northern bridges and then the Northern Bridge again on a fourth straight morning. Zelensky counted 1,900 attack drones , 1,700 aerial bombs, and 25 missiles in a single week; more than 800 of the drones were jet-powered. Friedrich Merz arrived in Kyiv on Sunday under air-raid sirens. Zelensky had told Reuters the day before that Ukraine would hit Russian refineries harder in response, and within hours Russia’s defense ministry promised to step up strikes on Kyiv. It launched 205 more drones overnight into Monday.

That same Sunday, Washington proposed trilateral technical talks with Moscow and Kyiv before the end of October, possibly in the UAE, with an energy truce on the agenda. Two days earlier, Axios had reported that the Pentagon moved two more Patriot batteries to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to guard their oil and gas plants in case Trump resumes bombing Iran.

The United States wants to broker the war’s terms. It is rationing the interceptors it once used to set the war’s tempo. And according to The New York Times , its envoys have been discussing a multibillion-dollar Lukoil deal alongside the peace terms. Ukraine has responded by building weapons Washington does not control. Europe has to decide whether to pay for them.

For most of this war, the United States managed escalation through the supply line. Kyiv had ATACMS missiles but could not fire them into Russia until November 2024 . Air defense worked the same way: Ukraine survived ballistic attacks with Patriot interceptors that only Washington could release.

Then the Gulf swallowed the stockpile. The U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran used an estimated 1,430 Patriot munitions in its first 39 days. A PAC-3 still takes more than two years to build. Ukraine has received over 600 advanced interceptors since April 2023; the Atlantic Council’s analysis puts its need at about 2,000 a year. With a third carrier strike group due in the Gulf by mid-November, demand there is rising. Kyiv can work out its place in the queue.

Moscow already has. Russia is on course to fire more than 1,000 ballistic missiles this year, nearly 15 times its 2023 total. One night in early July, Ukraine stopped 4 of 49. It downs roughly 90 percent of drones but less than a third of ballistic missiles, and Russia has stockpiled hundreds more for the winter. The Patriot production license Trump granted, which Zelensky announced on September 25, will produce defensive batteries in two years. Winter is weeks away.

So, Kyiv stopped waiting. Long-range drones built at home have already done what no Western supplier allowed. Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara said on Sunday that 51 percent of Russia’s refining capacity had been damaged, up from 45 per cent on September 21. At Valdai, Vladimir Putin conceded that the refinery strikes had cost Russia roughly 1 percent of GDP.

Washington has tried to take back that leverage. On September 13, Donald Trump told Zelensky “to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.” Three weeks later, Kyiv promised to hit refineries harder. A government that depends on American munitions could not have said that. The FP-7 widens the gap, letting Ukraine strike Iskander launch sites and depots instead of only absorbing what they fire.

The interceptor variant, the FP-7.X, is the core of Freyja , an air-defense project launched in Paris on July 13 that brings together 12 companies, among them Saab, Thales, Kongsberg, Diehl, and Hensoldt. Its backers put the cost at about $700,000 per intercept. A PAC-3 costs $3.8 million or more and is often fired two or three at a time. Fire Point aims to have interceptors ready for production by the end of this year, a prototype in the first half of 2027 and a first live interception test in July. Every one of those figures is a promise until the flight tests are done. They are also the only figures on the table that scale to 2,000 a year.

European treasuries should care most about that price gap, because they are already paying the higher one. On September 11, the European Commission approved a €6.1 billion tranche from the Ukraine loan that exhausted the €28.3 billion set aside for Ukraine’s defense in 2026. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that it meant that Ukraine “can now also purchase the Patriot equipment it needs.” European money, in other words, is queuing for the same American interceptors the Pentagon is sending to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. An interceptor designed in Kyiv, integrated by European firms and paid for in euros would send the next tranche to European production lines instead of Raytheon’s order book. Zelensky has called Freyja “not a replacement, but a supplement” to Patriot.

Nine governments signed the Paris declaration alongside Ukraine, but none committed to a joint budget . In September, EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius offered “some kind of financial assistance” through the €90 billion loan for the European Defense Industry Program, whose entire budget of €1.5 billion has to cover every other European priority too. Fire Point’s chief designer has said that two or three missiles a month would not be enough to matter. Kyiv faces a $27 billion shortfall in its defense budget. Kubilius himself, addressing the European Parliament’s defense committee on October 1, urged member states to hand Ukraine their own PAC-3 stocks now in exchange for the missiles Kyiv has on order for 2027. That swap would get Ukraine through this winter. It would not get it through the next one.

Germany showed on Sunday what fast money looks like. Merz brought €1 billion in military aid and €350 million for energy repairs, and the two governments signed 15 industrial agreements worth €8.5 billion. They are also finalizing a deal to jointly produce weapons with a range of more than 965 kilometers. Much of the air-defense money goes to counter-drone systems, and Ukraine needs them: it brings down only about 60 percent of jet-powered Shaheds. Drones that hunt drones do nothing against an Iskander. “If Russia is not stopped,” Merz warned , “its war machine will sooner or later turn against us.” The ballistic missile is the part of that machine Europe has not yet decided to pay to stop.

Any American-brokered settlement rests on an unstated assumption: that Washington can deliver Kyiv’s restraint because it controls what Kyiv can fire. Trump’s diesel demand tested that assumption, and it failed. A Ukraine that builds its own missiles, and whose air defense is built with European partners, can ignore the leash, and the Kremlin knows it. Putin warned at Valdai that a direct attack on Kaliningrad would put “all the weapons at our country’s disposal” on the agenda. That line was aimed at Europe, not Kyiv. The budget Moscow unveiled on Friday allots 17.1 trillion roubles to defense in 2027, about $205 billion and a post-Soviet record of roughly a third of federal spending, while health and education are each cut by more than 5 percent. Russia is planning a long war against an opponent it expects to keep firing back.

Europe can match that planning for a fraction of the cost. A joint Freyja production fund sized for 2,000 interceptors a year would cost about $1.4 billion at Fire Point’s price. That buys 280 to 370 PAC-3s, or roughly what Merz carried to Kyiv in a single visit. The fund should buy audit rights as well as missiles: Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau has examined Fire Point’s ownership and pricing in an anti-graft probe . The company denies wrongdoing and commissioned its own international audit. European taxpayers will want independent access written into the contract.

Merz, with France and Britain, has called a Coalition of the Willing meeting in Berlin this winter. If the fund is signed there, it will create an air-defense industry that answers to European capitals and Kyiv. If it is not, Ukraine’s needs will take a backseat to those of the Gulf.

The post Ukraine No Longer Needs Washington’s Permission to Hit Back appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .