Talking to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in Ankara on Wednesday, July 8th, U.S. president Donald Trump offered Ukraine the legal licence to produce Patriot missiles on its home soil.
We are gonna give you a licence to make Patriots.
I think they can produce them very quickly once we explain it.
The policy shift would not provide the missiles in the first instance, and likely came as a surprise to defence manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Instead, the idea is that Ukraine would assemble the weapons on-site within the embattled country. In practice, this could lead to their production at a safe location elsewhere in mainland Europe.
A single Patriot battery, with missiles, is worth around $1bn (€867 million), with—according to the U.S. Department of Defense/War—only 600 missiles produced per year. Trump sees granting Ukraine the Patriot production licence meant it could no longer “complain that we’re not giving them enough.”
On Wednesday he also asked the Ukrainian president if he was prepared to go to Moscow and negotiate. “It’s difficult—there are a lot of Ukrainian drones there,” quipped Zelensky.
