A distorted quote from the “FirePoint” CEO Iryna Terekh is being circulated in media, stating that the company will no longer produce cruise missiles.
According to Babel’s analysis, the narrative was shared by at least 18 major social media channels in a matter of hours on October 26. Variations range from claims that “Fire Point did not make missiles and will not make them” to out-of-context statements that the missile was a “political statement”.
Some channels also spread Terekhʼs quote with manipulative captions after “Fire Point” published a post about using lard to protect sensitive components from the cold at around 3:30 PM. In particular, this was done by non-factional the MP Oleksiy Honcharenko and former MP Ihor Mosiychuk.
In fact, in an old podcast on the UT-2 YouTube channel on July 20, the interviewer first asked Terekh if the company planned to develop variants of various cruise missiles, including smaller ones. To this, the “Fire Point” CEO replied that the company had no such plans yet.
“We started developing ballistics for a cruise missile. But it’s a certain iterative path, which is complex, and it’s not fast. And we decided, like, let’s do something simpler while we’re at it, which is already clearer to us, which we have more experience with. That’s how ʼFlamingoʼ came about. I think it was much more important as a political statement than as some kind of ʼsuper-duper-wunderwaffle,’” she said in the podcast.
After that, users on social networks drew the wrong conclusion: they wrote that the company would no longer produce “Flamingo”.
In response to one such post on X, she replied that the company would focus on developing the existing cruise missile model and direct efforts to developing two ballistic models.
For more news and in-depth stories from Ukraine, please follow us on X.