Ukraine is racing to develop its own ballistic missiles while advancing a European anti-ballistic defense system, with President Volodymyr Zelensky setting a target of concrete results by the turn of 2026–2027. The push comes as Russia intensifies ballistic attacks on the Ukrainian cities. Seventeen people were killed and 51 injured in Kyiv and the surrounding region on Wednesday during Russia’s third large-scale missile-and-drone attack on the area in less than a week. Ukraine intercepted 98 attack drones during the barrage but failed to shoot down any of the 28 missiles Russia launched.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The mounting casualties have sharpened Kyiv’s urgency to secure more Western interceptors while developing a domestic answer to Russia’s expanding ballistic threat. “Our FREYJA program — a joint European anti-ballistic system — is already actively underway,” Zelensky announced in his Thursday evening address. The initiative is intended to give Ukraine an anti-ballistic capability possessed by only a small group of countries. “Few countries in the world have built such an anti-ballistic project for themselves. Ukraine must join this circle of states. All the necessary conditions for this have been created,” Zelensky stressed. Other countries spent decades developing comparable systems, according to the president, while Ukraine must compress that timeline dramatically.