Ukraine says it moved a missile factory out of the country so that Russia can't blow it up
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Ukraine moved a missile plant abroad to protect it from Russian attacks, a Ukraine official said.
Oleksiy Danilov declined to give specifics, saying that Ukraine's missile program is "classified".
Ukraine has made ramping up its own ammunition production a key priority going forward.
Ukraine said it has shifted part of its domestic missile production facilities abroad after Russia struck a Ukrainian assembly plant, according to Spanish media.
"What I can say is that, unfortunately, Russia hit the place where these missiles were being assembled," Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, told Spanish newspaper ABC.
"Now we have moved a certain part of production outside our country," Danilov said.
Danilov didn't specify when and where the attack took place, or where the facility was moved to. He also declined to give specifics on Ukraine's missile program.
"This is a classified program, and no one will tell you how it is going," he added.
Earlier this month, Danilov told Ukrainian Radio that Ukraine has been developing its own missiles since 2020, some of which are capable of hitting targets as far as 930 miles into Russian-held territory.
He insisted the weapons would be used only against Russian military facilities, not civilians.
In an interview with Ukrainske Radio last month, Danilov also said that a Ukrainian-made missile had destroyed a Russian S-400 Triumf anti-aircraft missile system in occupied Crimea on August 23.
Ukraine's defense minister, Rustem Umerov, told The Economist last week that his country is working hard to rebuild its arms industry.
"Anything that can be produced locally must be produced locally," he said.
Umerov said he planned to ratchet up local production by overhauling state firms and rewarding private arms makers, who account for 20% to 30% of local production.
Ukraine is intensifying its domestic production partly out of fear Western deliveries could fall behind its military needs, Sergej Sumlenny, founder of the German think tank European Resilience Initiative Center, told Insider.
Sumlenny said Ukraine's allies have not increased ammunition production and delivery to the level required by a war of this intensity, assuming it will last another 12 months.
"In such a situation, it is logical to have more sites of ammunition production," he said.
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