Ukraine’s anti-Shahed arsenal appears to have another addition: a light buggy that mounts a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.
These are the same family of missiles best known for raining down on Middle Eastern targets from American drones, such as the Predator and the Reaper. Now they’re being repurposed as air defense weapons to combat Russian drone strikes against Ukraine.
The platform, a light off-road car known as the V2X Tempest, was shown in action as part of a New Year's air defense montage posted by Ukraine's Air Command on 1 January. In the video, a Tempest appears to shoot down a flying target at night.
Kyiv has not revealed how many Tempests it has, nor the breadth of their operational deployment. But if fielded in sufficient quantities, the vehicles may contribute additional shoot-and-scoot capabilities to Ukraine’s air defenses, stretched by nightly terror strikes.
The Chassis
The system lands somewhere at the midpoint between more expensive air defense systems and cheaper solutions — such as MANPADS fired from the shoulder, drone interceptors, and machine guns on trucks.
Little is known about the Tempest. The developer, US company V2X first revealed it at the AUSA 2025 weapons expo in Washington D.C. — its detailed technical specifications were not disclosed publicly.
What is known is that this buggy was designed to counter drones, copters, and low-flying aircraft, built around a chassis that resembles the Can-Am Maverick X3 commercial off-road vehicle. The Maverick starts at $20,000, according to the Can-Am website.
According to a product fact sheet for the Tempest reviewed by Army Recognition, the logic was to combine an off-the-shelf vehicle with fire-and-forget functionality: deploy quickly, shoot the target, and get out of dodge just as fast.
The vehicle is also meant to operate in environments that have degraded communications and GPS, characteristic of Ukraine’s battlefields.
The Weapons
The weapon system is where it gets interesting. Hellfires are typically laser-guided, but there is also the AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire, which uses active millimeter-wave radar to home in on its targets.
The Tempests Ukraine has may be using this Longbow variant, given the compact radar dish mounted between the launchers, plus the fact that optical targeting systems were not demonstrated at the arms expo, as Militarnyi reports.
If true, this jives with the Tempest’s mission profile: to be able to move immediately after launch.
The radar can reportedly be switched between mobile and stationary configurations, without losing accuracy or situational awareness. It looks to be made more for target acquisition, rather than 360-degree surveillance — in Ukraine’s networked, multilayered air defense, the crews would be getting info on the targets from other sources anyhow.
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The missiles have a reported range of about 8 kilometers, and can accelerate to 1,600 kph, far faster than even the latest, jet-powered Shaheds.
The Pricetag
Still, while cheaper than exquisite air defense missiles, the Hellfires are not exactly cheap. Depending on how much technical support and training goes into the price, each missile could easily cost north of $150,000 in 2021.
In February 2025, the US approved the sale of 3,000 Hellfires to Israel, plus related equipment and support, for a total of $660 million. This comes out to $220,000 per missile, if additional expenses are subsumed into the per-unit cost.
This means the Tempest’s effectors are more expensive than Shahed-136s, whose in-Russia production costs were estimated at up to $70,000 in 2025.
However, the jet-powered versions may be more expensive.
