A Millennial Furniture Designer Is Behind the Drones Battering Russia
Iryna Terekh, 34, used to design benches. She is now CEO of Ukraine’s largest private defense company, Fire Point.
By Matthew Luxmoore
Photography by Justyna Mielnikiewicz
Aug. 15, 2026 7:00 pm ET
KYIV, Ukraine—Two weeks after the war began, the woman who would later revolutionize Ukraine’s drone capabilities was driving through a town near Kyiv when her car came under Russian fire.
Iryna Terekh, the young owner of a small furniture company, sped out of the town of Bucha with her ailing mother in the passenger seat. She published a photo of a bullet hole in her car’s rear bumper—and a defiant manifesto.
image: A bullet hole in Terekh’s car’s rear bumper from her journey leaving Bucha, Ukraine. Iryna Terekh
“I’m one of those women who doesn’t know how to fight,” she wrote on Instagram in March 2022. “But I’m sure of one thing: I’ll do absolutely everything in my power to make sure nothing of this sort ever happens in my country again.”
Today, the 34-year-old Terekh is chief executive and chief technical officer of Fire Point, a defense company with 7,000 employees whose long-range drones and missiles are hitting targets across Russia and helping Ukraine to shift the balance of the war.
She travels to European defense forums sporting oversize glasses and often a wide grin, to pitch partners on Fire Point’s growing roster of high-tech products: air-defense systems, drones and a cruise missile nicknamed the Flamingo with a 2,500-pound warhead. She is among the few female leaders in a Ukrainian defense sector where around 90% of employees are male.
Her Instagram page once featured wholesome photos of architecture. Now it shows videos of exploding Russian warehouses and power plants—hit by the weaponry that Terekh helped design.
“Just another day of watching Russia burn,” she wrote on Instagram this week, posting a photo of flames rising over a Siberian petrochemicals plant, to the soundtrack of The Prodigy’s “Firestarter.”
Terekh’s path is one traveled by many peaceful Ukrainians who have embraced the war effort after realizing their skills were needed to blunt Russia’s invasion. Stunt pilots have become military aviators. Former floral artists assemble drones. Toy makers now manufacture decoy arms.
“I would never have gotten involved with weapons if my country wasn’t invaded,” Terekh told The Wall Street Journal.
Black smoke rises from a Russian oil refinery. AFP/
Getty Images/
Before the full-scale war, her small business made outdoor furniture and ornaments such as benches, flower pots and wash basins. She also worked with urban developers on pedestrian bridges and walkways in the Ukrainian capital. She said she saw architecture as a way of reducing the distance between people.
“I had a big dream: that people in Kyiv, a city I love, and soon in all other Ukrainian cities would stop running from one location to another and would enjoy the streets, enjoy shared spaces, and interact more,” said Terekh.
The dream was shattered when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Terekh decided to temporarily leave the country. But first she had to collect her mother who lived near Bucha, just north of Kyiv, where the Russians were closing in.
She picked up her mother, but on the highway they came under fire from Russian snipers. They doubled back into the town and spent days cowering in a basement, while the Russians took over the area.
Terekh noted down what times each day the Russians exchanged fire with Ukrainian troops, trying to find the best time to escape. One morning, the two women crept out and Terekh drove past charred vehicles at top speed to reach Kyiv.
Weeks later, Russian troops in Bucha committed one of the war’s worst massacres of civilians, leaving many victims’ bodies lying in the streets.
Russian troops in Bucha committed one of the war’s worst massacres of civilians.
The ordeal changed Terekh. She launched a nonprofit group to channel humanitarian aid to soldiers. Her company, Terekh.Group, pivoted to making concrete antitank fortifications. Terekh publicly renounced Russian, her mother tongue.
In late 2022 Terekh was contacted by Denys Shtilierman, an entrepreneur from Odesa who had started Fire Point after growing frustrated with the high cost of drones he was buying for the Ukrainian military through a nonprofit he ran. He hired her as production director in 2023.
Shtilierman, an engineer and physicist more comfortable tinkering with prototypes than managing personnel and production chains, had known Terekh for several years and valued her business acumen.
“He told me: ‘I can create almost anything, but I need you to help me to bring this to life,’ ” Terekh said. He wanted her to turn the weapons he was testing, including a long-range drone, into mass-produced items.
But Terekh wanted a bigger role. She stayed up late studying how missiles work, digging up old Soviet-era manuals and consulting a nonagenarian rocket scientist whom she hired as an adviser.
When Shtilierman completed his vision for the long-range drone, she said the design wasn’t ideal for large-scale production. Channeling her knowledge of materials, she proposed a manufacturing method that cut the time needed to make a drone wing from six days to just 2½ hours.
The drone, the FP-1, would become Fire Point’s flagship product with a stated range of 2,100 miles. It has played a key role in Ukraine’s attacks on oil refineries and other targets deep inside Russia.
In 2024, the company tested a cruise missile that packs a far bigger punch. Prototypes of the missile, the FP-5, were painted in bright colors so their debris was easy to find after launches. After a pink FP-5 was test-launched, some of Terekh’s male staff joked: “This is what happens when a woman takes over a defense company.” The missile soon became known as the Flamingo
Workers assemble the Flamingo in a weapons factory in Ukraine. Svet Jacqueline for WSJ (2)
Terekh took the teasing as a challenge. She recruited more women, eliminated a previous gender pay gap and proposed daycare centers at the company’s main sites—an idea thwarted by security concerns.
“The speed with which Iryna has been able to adapt to the complexity and skill sets required to run such a company has been impressive to watch,” said former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who joined Fire Point’s board last year.
Terekh isn’t involved in picking targets inside Russia. Fire Point leaves that to the military. In interviews, she has pushed back against Russian reports of civilian casualties from Kyiv’s attacks, saying Ukraine is far more precise in its targeting than Russia.
She used to consider herself a pacifist, and saw weapons purely as instruments of pain and destruction.
Iryna Terekh with a stuffed flamingo. Fire Point’s FP-5 cruise missile is known as the Flamingo.
Now, she said, they are a necessary means to secure Ukraine’s sovereignty and stop Russia.
“In order to build something nice, first you have to destroy something ugly,” she said.
On a recent afternoon, Terekh arrived with her 12-year-old deaf dog Chuck and her bodyguards at an upscale Kyiv real-estate development that she had helped design.
Planned as a hub with offices, co-working spaces, common areas, shops and cafes, today it is largely empty, with the facade of one block damaged by a recent Russian airstrike.
Sitting on an outdoor chair that her former company made, Terekh compared herself with other Ukrainians who harbor pent-up anger over Russian destruction but never get to release it.
“I’m in a more privileged position, because I have the instruments to release my anger,” she said. “Even after the heaviest night of Russian bombardment, I get to wake up and send all of my feelings back.”
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