On September 10, 2026, in Calgary, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and presented Ukraine’s wartime drone sector as the model Canada would now copy. “In just four years, Ukraine has built a world-leading drone industry,” Carney said. “Ukrainian drones costing a few hundred dollars have sunk warships worth hundreds of millions.” He added that Ukraine was “on track to build more drones than China, Russia, and every NATO member,” and that Canada could learn from that record.
The industrial pledge was just as specific. “The Canadian Armed Forces currently have 2,000 drones in their inventory,” Carney said. “In the years to come, we will need millions.” He called the day’s announcement “a key part of our plan to build industrial capacity here in Canada to produce millions of drones within the next two years,” said the contracts unveiled that morning would increase the number of drones then deployed by the CAF tenfold, and added: “Importantly, one-third of all the drones we manufacture will go to support Ukraine’s defence of its homeland.” The PMO said those first contracts were worth up to $50 million.
The two governments also signed a declaration for a 100-year partnership, which Carney said would later be turned into a longer framework covering defence, trade, reconstruction, energy, critical minerals, and technology. Ottawa launched the Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace, a national buying platform Carney said was modelled on the system Ukraine had developed, giving individual CAF units direct access to nearly 400 Canadian suppliers. He said Canada was pairing its companies with “Ukraine’s world-leading drone manufacturers,” naming the existing Sentinel Research and Development agreement with Airlogix and a new agreement between General Dynamics Mission Systems Canada and the Ukrainian firm GreenTech. Canada separately announced about $350 million for air-defence interceptors through a United States mechanism. Operation UNIFIER, the CAF training mission for Ukrainian forces, was not new that day; Defence Minister David McGuinty had already extended it to 2029. The Calgary joint statement only confirmed that Canada would sustain the mission under that mandate.
Who is Fire Point?
Fire Point is a Kyiv-based defence firm that did not exist as a weapons company before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Corporate records and reconstructions published by the New York Times and Ukrainian outlets show that it grew out of a film-casting and location business. For a long period, the legally listed owner was Yehor Skalyha, a film-location executive. Its public-facing technical leadership includes Iryna Terekh, who had previously been associated with concrete outdoor furniture, and Denys Shtilerman, who later emerged as chief designer and majority owner.
The company’s rise was not incremental. Its principal products are the FP-1 and FP-2 long-range one-way attack drones, the FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missile, and later ballistic and interceptor work under designations such as FP-7 and Freyja. By 2024 and 2025, executives and the Times were placing Fire Point’s contracts in the range of one billion dollars. Company figures have put FP-1 production at one hundred to two hundred drones a day, at a unit price usually cited at about $55,000. Fire Point and Ukrainian officials say those aircraft account for a large share of Ukraine’s deep strikes inside Russia.
How Fire Point connects to Zelenskyy’s circle
There is a documented path from Zelenskyy’s old entertainment world into Fire Point, even though no court has found that Zelenskyy himself owns the company. Timur Mindich co-owned Kvartal 95, the television studio Zelenskyy founded before he became president and Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau later named Mindich the alleged organizer of Operation Midas, a kickback scheme of roughly $100 million built around the state nuclear company Energoatom. In November 2025, hours before investigators raided his home, Mindich fled to Israel, where he sits comfortably to this day.
Fire Point’s early corporate history sits in that same world. Yehor Skalyha, the man listed for a long period as the company’s legal owner, ran a film-location business that worked on productions connected to Zelenskyy’s acting career. That overlap is why the New York Times, the Kyiv Independent, and Ukrainian investigators treated Fire Point’s sudden rise as a political problem rather than an ordinary wartime success story.
Denys Shtilerman now says he holds about 97.5 percent of the company and that Skalyha keeps only a small remainder. He says he hid his own role in the early years because his family was still in Russia, and Mindich tried to buy 50 percent of the firm, first for about $100 million and later at much higher figures, but he refused. Mindich says he is neither an owner, a shareholder, nor a beneficiary. But NABU and the Defence Ministry’s Public Anti-Corruption Council claim otherwise. After Ukrainska Pravda published transcripts of conversations between Mindich and then-Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, the council said Mindich spoke as if he ran Fire Point, pressed Umerov for more funding, discussed a sale of the company, and should be treated as its likely beneficial owner.
None of that makes Fire Point “Zelenskyy’s company” as a legal fact. It does make Fire Point a politically connected defence champion whose alleged shadow patron is Zelenskyy’s old business partner, now a fugitive in Ukraine’s largest wartime fraud case. When Carney praised “Ukraine’s world-leading drone manufacturers” in Calgary, he spoke of that industry as a single class and did not separate it from the company at the centre of the fight.
What the whistleblower put on record
The central whistleblower is Maj. Yuriy Kasyanov, an aerial-reconnaissance officer and drone designer whose unit built the “Spear,” or “Spys,” long-range drone and carried out deep-strike missions, including a 2023 strike near the Kremlin.
He has a specific timeline: on October 2, 2025, at 11 a.m., he testified to NABU in the Fire Point file, and he claimed the State Border Guard Administration signed a directive disbanding his unit. He first blamed presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak, later writing that the “Mindich–Shtilerman gang” destroyed the unit through Border Guard commander Serhii Deyneko.
The cost testimony is what produced the “millions a day” figure now circulating in Canada. Kasyanov told a Verkhovna Rada temporary investigative commission on May 7, 2026, that his comparable long-range drone cost about $4,500 to $5,000, or $10,000 to $15,000 once a German 3W engine of about $5,000 was included. Fire Point’s FP-1, he said, was sold to the state at about $55,000. The implied markup was roughly $40,000 per aircraft, and if the company built 100 drones a day, as it publicly claimed, that excess would come to about $4 million a day.
He did not stop at price either; allegedly, Fire Point seized about a third of the drone market after barely existing the year before, and its founders had no prior drone background, but sat close to presidential business councils. He told the commission that 3,000 Fire Point drones had been launched at Moscow in a year and that only one arrived, and he called the company’s talk of 7,000 ballistic missiles a year technically absurd, arguing that Ukraine lacks the microelectronics plants and that partners will not export that class of guidance at scale.
The Times reported a state audit found that Fire Point contracts were awarded about $16.7 million above a lower-cost option because a mandatory price negotiation never happened—and while NABU has been examining alleged inflated component prices and delivery numbers, there is no public conviction of Fire Point or Shtilerman on that file to date.
However, it is worth mentioning that NABU has investigated other drone procurement scams, including FPV and electronic-warfare kickbacks involving a member of parliament, regional officials, a National Guard commander, and a manufacturer, who inflated commercial drone purchases worth more than 90 million hryvnia. But so far, the Fire Point monopoly on the drone market remains unfinished.
The cartel problem is real.
In July 2025, the French outlet Intelligence Online reported that Mexico’s National Intelligence Center warned Ukraine’s Security Service that Mexican nationals were joining the International Legion not out of ideology but to learn first-person-view tactics. Ukraine opened a joint look by the SBU and military intelligence at Spanish-speaking volunteers, especially around units such as Ethos. Defence News, Kyiv Post, El País, El Universal, and later the Financial Times and ACLED followed versions of the same story.
The reporting is consistent with the pattern, if not in every named case. Mexican and Colombian recruits were said to seek FPV modules more aggressively than any other training. Forged documents appeared in the secondary literature, including Salvadoran, Panamanian, and Venezuelan covers and one case circulated under the alias “Águila-7,” described as a man with an alleged former Mexican special-forces background who entered the Legion in March 2024 and completed FPV training in Lviv. Colombian officials and a Financial Times source described recruiters looking specifically for FPV assembly, encrypted command links, and warhead setup. ACLED and Colombian reporting show fibre-optic and night-vision attack drones, first proven in Ukraine, appearing in Cauca and other conflict zones. Mexican cartel drone use has also escalated on its own track, including an October 2025 three-drone strike on a Tijuana prosecutor’s office.
The Canadian question the Calgary event did not answer
Carney’s speech treated Ukrainian drone production as a completed export: cheap, battle-tested, larger than China, Russia, and NATO combined, and ready to be reproduced in Canadian factories. The record underneath that slogan is messier. Ukraine has built a real drone industry, and both cheap FPV systems and long-range airframes have changed the war. The same industry has a politically connected national champion, a fugitive presidential associate on tape discussing its finances, an unresolved NABU pricing file, and a senior officer who says the state paid a $40,000 premium on each long-range drone. Canada is now promising the capacity to manufacture millions of airframes, sending a third of what it makes to Ukraine, and restating a training mission that sits inside the same battlefield ecosystem criminal groups have tried to tap.
The unanswered questions are enough without putting words in Carney’s mouth. Which Ukrainian firms will actually receive Canadian co-production money, and have they been run through beneficial-ownership checks against the Mindich file? Does the new marketplace treat Fire Point-class suppliers as ordinary vendors or as high-risk counterparties? What end-use and personnel-screening standards apply to FPV knowledge transferred through UNIFIER and through the Ukrainian schools Canada is now copying? If Kasyanov’s markup math is even half right, a plan to manufacture millions of drones multiplies the leakage as well as the output.
Canada has adopted the slogan. It has not yet published the audit.