The Russian company Kronstadt plans to produce up to 250 compact cruise missiles “Banderol” per month. These figures significantly exceed estimates by Ukrainian intelligence. The missile can fly 500 km and costs tens of times less than Western counterparts.
As early as the beginning of 2025, the Russian company JSC Kronstadt intended to bring production of compact subsonic cruise missiles S8000 “Banderol” to 250 units per month. This is reported by the Wargonzo channel citing data from the Western OSINT project Nordsint, which analyzed the company’s open tender documents.
According to the study, after an initial purchase of 200 sets of parts, order volumes were supposed to rise to 250 per month. These figures more than triple earlier estimates by Ukrainian intelligence, which had claimed that Russia could produce no more than 80 such missiles per month.
The “Banderol” missile itself has a flight range of about 500 km, reaches speeds of up to 650 km/h, and carries a 114 kg warhead. The main advantage of the system is its relatively low cost combined with long range: according to expert estimates, producing one such missile costs between $50,000 and $150,000.
By comparison, the American PAC-3 MSE interceptor missile for the Patriot air-defense system costs about $4 million — roughly 40 times more. As the authors of Wargonzo emphasize, the use of cheap “Banderols” creates an extremely unfavorable economic balance for the adversary, effectively depleting stocks of expensive Western air-defense assets.
