Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence signed its first state contract for the 1KR1 Sap san operational-tactical missile system in 2022, and the system entered serial production and systematic use in 2025. This was reported by Militarnyi, citing Oleksandr Liiev, who served as deputy head of the MoD’s state procurement department in 2022–2023.
According to Liiev, in August 2022, while heading the department responsible for military-technical policy and weapons development, he signed the first state contract with the Pivdenne Design Bureau to procure the new Ukrainian missile system. The disclosure also revealed the system’s full official designation for the first time — 1KR1 Sap san.
Liiev said the first tests of the system took place in 2023, followed by initial test strikes against Russian targets in 2024. In 2025, the Sap san system transitioned to systematic combat use.
In his post, Liiev outlined the main technical characteristics of the Sap san. It is a next-generation Ukrainian operational-tactical missile system featuring a solid-fuel ballistic missile with a high-precision guidance system. The missile’s range is up to 500 km, with a launch weight of about 3.5 tonnes and a 500-kg warhead. Its speed reaches up to 2,300 m/s (around Mach 7), with a circular error probable of up to 10 metres.
The guidance system combines inertial navigation, satellite correction and several types of seekers — electro-optical and radar — developed by Pivdenne for different target sets. Launch preparation time is under 10 minutes, while post-launch redeployment takes about four minutes.
Militarnyi notes that plans to resume work on the Sap san system in 2022 had been made as early as 2021. Russia’s defence ministry claimed its first encounter with the system in March 2023. In August 2024, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the successful testing of Ukraine’s first domestically produced ballistic missile, and in 2025 he repeatedly confirmed the combat use of the Sap san.
Liiev stressed that the Sap san is a sovereign Ukrainian technology fully controlled by the state, and thanked the Pivdenne Design Bureau and partner enterprises in Kharkiv, Pavlohrad, Kyiv and Dnipro for developing the system.