The Neptune complex was adopted by the Ukrainian army in August 2020. It was developed as an anti-ship missile.
After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military began to use it to attack Russian targets, the most famous of which is the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva.which was hit in the Black Sea on April 13, 2022, and sank.
On August 27, 2024, Zelensky announced that Ukraine had successfully tested the first domestically produced ballistic missile. The president did not disclose any details about it.
The fact that Ukraine has its own cruise and ballistic missiles will begin production by mid-2025, the state enterprise Spetstechnoexport was informed at the beginning of November last year.
Rustem Umerov, who was then the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, announced the expansion of production of an improved model of the Neptune rocket on November 19, 2024. According to him, Kyiv has scaled up mass production cruise missiles R-360 “Neptune” with improvements for hitting targets at long distances.
August 24, 2025 Ministry of Defense of Ukraine for the first time showed the Long Neptune rocket, which hits 1 thousand km.
Among the last known defeats by “Neptune” (there are several of its models, including “Long Neptune” with a range of more than 1 thousand km) – hit the Karachevsky plant “Electrodetal” in the Bryansk region of the Russian Federation on the night of September 29, 2025.
