On 08 July 2026, Ukraine and Germany signed an implementation agreement to jointly produce the BARS, a jet-powered long-range strike weapon that Ukraine has used to target deep inside Russia, including Moscow.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius signed the agreement on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara.
According to Sybiha, the agreement resulted from work carried out by the two countries’ respective defence ministries under Germany’s “Build with Ukraine” initiative. Germany will finance production through the first phase of the project, and every unit built under the agreement will go to Ukraine’s Defence Forces.
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The Bars designation covers a family of weapons that Ukraine officially classifies as “missile-drones”, but is fundamentally a jet-powered one-way attack (OWA) loitering munition.
In terms of specifications, the Bars has a wingspan of roughly 2 m, a biplane tail, and a miniature turbojet engine mounted above the fuselage at the tail. It is fired from the ground using a rail-launch system, but with the support of a solid-fuel rocket-assisted take-off (RATO) motor. The baseline Bars reportedly offers a range of 700-800 km.
Ukraine recently showcased the ‘Bars RS’ variant at Eurosatory 2026 in Paris, where a representative of the manufacturer (which was and still is undisclosed) stated the munition can carry a 22 kg warhead and has a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 135 kg with a 95 litre fuel tank. However, they added that the BARS has a heavier variant with an MTOW of up to 220 kg and warhead options of 60 kg and 105 kg.
From additional reporting, the manufacturer stated that the BARS can reach targets of up to 1,000 km and, up to this point, the family has accumulated around 7,000 launches across testing and real-world combat use. The BARS has a cruise speed of 400-450 km/hour and a top speed of 620 km/hour.
A private Ukrainian company developed the BARS in 2024, and the manufacturer’s name is still withheld for operational security reasons. The first public look at the airframe came in December 2025, when the Museum of the Russian-Ukrainian War at Ukraine’s National Defence University put one on display.
The BARS leverages a composite fuselage assembled from a minimum number of parts so as to push costs down and drive up production scale. This has been a key reason why it has seen significant use by the Ukrainian military and has emerged as a long-range strike weapon of choice.
Interestingly, the BARS also incorporates a design attribute increasingly being seen in low-cost cruise missile (LCCM) designs, i.e., an external turbojet mounted to the outside of the airframe.
Not only does this simplify the munition’s core design, but it also allows for modularity where the engine can be sourced from whichever vendor happens to be available at any specific time.
By December 2025, the BARS’ production and deployment output has reached scale, with observers reporting launch salvos of 100 rounds being fired within a single event.
In terms of Germany, Berlin had been involved with the BARS before, as in May 2025, it agreed to finance the purchase of BARS rounds alongside Liutyi strike drones and other Ukrainian-made long-range strike weapons under a package worth roughly €400 million. This new agreement builds on that relationship by integrating German producers into Ukraine’s warfighting supply chain.
The “Build with Ukraine” initiative, which Germany launched in December 2025, has roughly €2 billion (i.e., $2.28 billion USD) allocated for 2026. The initiative basically subsidizes Ukrainian weapons manufacturing, whether that manufacturing occurs inside Ukraine or at plants built on German soil.
The program has already spawned new defence vendors, each of them currently geared to supporting Ukraine’s wartime needs. In February 2026, for example, Germany’s Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics stood up a joint venture outside Munich to build the Linza logistics drone.
In the broadest sense, the BARS offers a clear blueprint of sorts on how to design and build a low-cost, long-range jet-powered effector. It is not a surprise, then, that the core design attributes (e.g., externally mounted turbojet engine) are being adopted in other solutions, like the MBDA Crossbow.
In Pakistan, for example, there are already numerous proposals at play to support the country’s apparent jet-powered OWA loitering munition requirement. However, a private company with limited resources could also enter the fray with a design similar to the BARS. This, while much cruder than, for example, a tailless delta or a more conventional cruise missile approach, could be more scalable as it could have a cheaper and simpler design, one that is easy for smaller and less resource-rich companies to offer.
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