A Ukrainian cruise missile

Every Saturday, the Wall Street Journal leads off its "Review" section by interviewing someone who's doing his or her best to change the world. Today's voice is that of Iryna Terekh, a 33-year-old Ukrainian. She set out to become an architect, hoping to make her country's Soviet-style cities more liveable. In the turmoil following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and Ukraine's far east, Ms Terekh dropped out of university to work as an engineer. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, she became technical director of Fire Point, designing drones and cruise missiles. They include the flamboyantly named Flamingo that saw its first combat use in August against a Russian FSB (secret service) base in occupied Crimea.

Flamingo is most often compared to the American Tomahawk, which is nearly 50 years old and has targeted terrorist bases since the Clinton administration. Most recently, we paid $1.4 million apiece for 149 Tomahawks. The Pentagon is okay with sending some to Ukraine, but Trump has demurred: "No, not really," he said last Sunday when asked about Tomahawks for Ukraine. (The US cruise missile is nuclear-capable, though it has never done so in combat, and Putin likes to spook American and European leaders by hinting that it might be a nuclear game-changer in Ukraine.)

The Flamingo has an engine mounted above its fuselage, rather like the German V-1 "buzz bomb" of 1944-45. "Thousands" of turbofan engines were junked in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broke up in 1990, Ms Terekh explains -- Ukraine was a major supplier of aircraft and assemblies for the USSR. Fire Point has refurbished and downsized them to give the Flamingo a range of 2500 miles while carrying a 2500-pound warhead -- nearly double the distance and quadruple the destructive power of the Tomahawk. Accuracy, of course, is quite another matter, but to judge by the August attack in Crimea, it's pretty good.