Ukraine is planning for an initial launch of its answer to the powerful US air defense system – the new Freyja interceptor missile – in mid-2027, the Director of the aerospace company Fire Point Denys Shtilerman said in a late Sunday comment. Work for the weapons system that would partially or possibly even totally replace US-made PAC-3 interceptor missiles that currently are the only means Ukraine has to intercept Russian ballistic missiles is going forward at a satisfactory pace, but much coordination work and sub-systems testing remains to be done before even an experimental home-grown Freyja might take to the air, Shtilerman wrote in an “X” post.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “We are planning a full-scale launch of the anti-ballistic interceptor by mid-2027. As of now, the first cluster of integration work within the Freyja project has been completed. Ahead lies a major and technologically complex stage – the unification of all components [and subsystems] into a single complex [unified weapons system]. After that, the system must undergo a full cycle of testing and confirm its ability to intercept ballistic targets,” Shtilerman said in part. The FirePoint/Shtilerman timeline was more ambitious than a Sunday prediction by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who stated that Ukraine hopes to field a domestically manufactured version of the US premier ballistic missile interceptor, the PAC-3 fired by the Patriot air defense system, in “12 months to several years.”