Why Russia Should Be Worried About Britain’s £400,000 Missile Programme for Ukraine

Britain’s effort to rapidly develop a new family of low-cost long-range strike missiles for Ukraine under its Project Brakestop should raise alarm bells in Moscow due to their potential to significantly alter the battlefield dynamics for the Russian armed forces operating in Ukraine.

Launched in late 2024, the Project Brakestop of the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) is intended to provide Ukraine with a mass-producible deep-strike capability that can be built quickly, fielded in large numbers and produced at substantially lower cost than existing cruise missiles.

The British government has set a target production rate of 20 missiles per month, with a unit cost of roughly GB£ 400,000 (roughly US$ 530,000) excluding the warhead, and expects at least one design to reach Ukraine by the end of 2026.

Unlike the Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missile, which carries a specialised 450 kg BROACH penetrator warhead for attacking hardened bunkers and underground facilities, Project Brakestop prioritises affordability, industrial scalability and operational attrition.

The MoD’s baseline requirement calls for a missile capable of carrying a 225 kg warhead over distances exceeding 500 km.

The program’s competitive approach, which challenged the industry participants to develop prototypes within months rather than years, has narrowed a larger field of bidders to three finalists, namely the MBDA UK’s Crossbow, MGI Engineering’s Tiger Shark and Rotron Aerospace’s SkyLance.

So, let us first take a brief look at the capabilities of their weapon systems before we discuss how they could spell trouble for the Russian military operating in Ukraine.

MBDA UK’s Crossbow, officially designated as the Crossbow One Way Effector (OWE) Heavy, is a ground-launched system capable of delivering payloads weighing up to 300 kg to targets located more than 800 km away.

The system can carry both kinetic and non-kinetic payloads and is intended to destroy static, high-value assets from a vehicle-based launcher. The company claims that it can operate in a complex electromagnetic environment.

The company has not publicly disclosed the system’s speed, but for the purposes of this article, the Author would like to adopt a working assumption that it could travel at around 700-900 km/h, placing it broadly within the subsonic regime typically associated with long-range cruise missiles.

MGI Engineering’s TigerShark can achieve ranges exceeding 1,000 km and reach speeds of 750 km/h while carrying a 300 kg payload. The company claims that it can operate effectively in GNSS-denied environments.

While the Rotron Aerospace’s SkyLance is a propeller-driven strike weapon that appears to prioritise range over speed.

According to company specifications, the system is capable of reaching speeds of up to 650 km/h and can travel approximately 1,200 km while carrying a 300 kg payload. While a lighter 150 kg payload extends its range to more than 2,700 km, thereby offering the greatest range of the three contenders.

None of the competing companies has disclosed the exact warhead configuration, but given the British MoD’s stated requirements, one could expect their systems to carry a unitary high-explosive blast-fragmentation (HE-frag) warhead, potentially coupled with delayed fuzes for improved penetration against semi-hardened targets.

So, based on that, let us now get to the discussion of the potential effect that the introduction of one or more of these systems could have on the overall battlefield dynamics in Ukraine.

How Project Brakestop Could Impact Russia’s War in Ukraine?

The Project Brakestop was launched in late 2024, after the United States delayed the transfer of long-range missiles, including ATACMS and the Anglo-French Storm Shadow, to Ukraine, and did not authorise their use deep inside Russian territory over fears of escalating the conflict with Moscow.

Therefore, one of the project’s key requirements was the complete exclusion of U.S.-origin components and reliance on U.S.-provided data, as this would allow Britain to supply the weapons without being constrained by American export regulations or political decisions.

The Author has argued multiple times since April 2024 that the only way Kyiv could realistically hope to reverse the Russian military gains in Ukraine is if the Ukrainian military receives a sufficient number of hard-hitting long-range munitions that can take out Russia’s fortified command and control centres as well as key logistics nodes and related infrastructure like bridges, all deep behind front lines.

In April 2024, the Author had made that suggestion based on Ukraine’s effective use of the U.S.’ Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) in October 2023 against two Russian airbases at Berdyansk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, which took out several Russian helicopters, ammunition, and equipment at these bases.

However, after having made that suggestion, the Author had also posed a question, which was whether the U.S. could spare enough ATACMS needed to help Ukraine regain all of its territory.

While the U.S. had 364 cluster variants of ATACMS at the time, which the U.S. Army no longer uses, it did not have enough ATACMS with unitary warheads to spare for Ukraine, which the U.S. Army still uses, and without the unitary warheads, an undertaking as significant as driving the Russian forces out of Ukraine cannot even be thought of.

The Author reiterated that argument in October 2025, when reports surfaced that the Trump administration was considering supplying Ukraine with stand-off munitions for strikes deep inside Russian territory, with proposed options reportedly ranging from the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile to Anduril Industries’ Barracuda-500.

However, even then, the Author posed a similar question: Can the U.S. provide Ukraine as many long-range munitions with unitary warheads as are needed for its armed forces to retake all of Ukrainian territory from the Russian military occupation, without compromising its own military preparedness?

Basically, it all comes down to numbers when trying to assess whether a certain strike capability can either help Ukraine push the Russian military entirely out of its territory or force the Kremlin to come to the negotiating table, where the latter agrees to cease all hostilities in exchange for being able to retain de facto control over the portions of the Ukrainian territory that its armed forces currently hold.

And this is where Britain’s Project Brakestop comes in. While it has not built another ATACMS, it may have found a halfway house between premium precision strike weapons and the realities of industrial warfare, trading speed, accuracy and bunker-busting capability for range, affordability and mass production.

So, the ATACMS is a tactical ballistic missile that travels at speeds of approximately Mach 3 to Mach 3.5, or around 3,700-4,300 km/h, allowing it to reach targets within minutes and significantly reducing an adversary’s reaction time. Reports suggest that it is nearly impossible to intercept an ATACM missile.

Also, the massive kinetic energy that comes with this supersonic speed enables the ATACMS to successfully destroy fortified targets.

By contrast, Project Brakestop’s three contenders are all designed to travel within the subsonic regime, meaning they are not intended to overwhelm the enemy’s defences through velocity but instead through numbers.

Therefore, even though both ATACMS and the systems being developed under Project Brakestop are designed around a 500 lb-class payload, they do not produce the equivalent destructive effects.

So, unlike the ATACMS that can take out hardened command centres or heavily defended airfields and aircraft shelters, or strategic bridges, missiles under Project Brakestop can only target soft and semi-hardened targets such as vehicles, radar and other air-defence systems, aircraft, buildings and depots.

That said, the missiles under Project Brakestop can be used by the Ukrainian armed forces to systemically degrade Russia’s rear-area support network by striking its ammunition depots, fuel storage sites, logistics hubs, command posts housed in ordinary buildings, vehicle maintenance facilities, transport infrastructure and air-defence systems.

That much should suffice to enable the Ukrainian ground troops to breach the Russian lines much more easily than before, making it possible to regain a significant amount of lost ground from the Russian military occupation in a very short span of time.

From that point onward, the possibility that the Ukrainian armed forces could eventually push the Russian military entirely out of their territory starts to become real.

Of course, even then the likelihood of such an eventuality will depend significantly on the number of available missiles, the production rate, and most importantly, whether Kyiv’s European partners have the financial wherewithal needed to award contracts for a sufficient number of missiles.

So, whether Britain or its European allies can realistically be expected to match up to Russia’s rate of weapons production still remains uncertain. Moreover, per a report by the BBC’s Russian service in June 2025, NATO has assessed that Russia has enough resources to finance its war in Ukraine through at least 2027.

However, the introduction of missiles under Project Brakestorm on the Ukrainian battlefield should suffice to severely undermine Russia’s confidence in the war’s long-term trajectory, forcing it to reconsider its maximalist demands that Ukraine’s forces cede the territories they hold in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts, where the Russian Federation had officially declared its annexation in September 2022.

Tanmay Kadam is a geopolitical observer based in India. He has experience working as a Defence and International Affairs journalist for EurAsian Times. He can be contacted at tanmaykadam700@gmail.com.