On Wednesday EU leadership revealed that the Zelensky government has formally asked the European Commission to provide several billion euros from the EU’s €90 billion ($105 billion) support loan to purchase US-made Patriot air defense missiles.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced just ahead of a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “It is worth several billion euros and would cover Ukraine’s air defense needs, including high-end PAC-3 air defense systems.”
At the same time, the EU’s top foreign affairs official, Kaja Kallas, is coming off a meeting of the bloc’s defense ministers wherein she cited no progress made on the Patriot funding plan.
“There were calls and talks about these missiles but there was, unfortunately, no concrete success today regarding this,” the EU top diplomat had spelled out Tuesday. “Patriot missiles about to expire [by Nato standards] should be sent to Ukraine.”
Looking back further, the last time that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the White House, he pleaded with President Trump for a “winter package” of 300 Patriot missiles.
Zelensky has long been warning that cities remain largely unprotected against Russia’s more advanced ballistic missile arsenal – a problem that only mass supplies of Patriots can remedy.
Ukraine’s supply have run dry, with batteries sitting in some locations, unable to be fired.
In mid-August, here’s what a CNN team observed on the ground in Ukraine:
CNN was the first media outlet to be given access to a Patriot on Ukrainian territory so Ukrainian officials could reveal one fact: the country has pretty much run out of interceptors. CNN agreed not to reveal details of the Patriot model or its location.
The 16 tubes of the system that CNN saw show signs of regular use, but its chief engineer in Ukraine, who gave only his first name Dmytro for security reasons, said he had not seen a Patriot launcher fire for six weeks. Ukraine has been reluctant to specify exactly how many interceptors, if any, it has left – President Volodymyr Zelensky says the country needs 5% of the US stockpile to survive the winter, but currently only has 1%.
There have notoriously been immense backlogs when it comes to Patriot production, and there’s said to be great global demand among US allies, especially given depletions which have come as a result of the Iran war.
Taking it back? Trump earlier talked about giving Ukraine a license to make Patriot systems…
Trump on Ukraine and Patriots:
We have the greatest weapons in the world, and we have to be careful about giving out secrets to the weapons. You can’t copy them.
It is like NVIDIA—they have a chip. They say you cannot copy it. pic.twitter.com/BLdJxzqOu2
— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 31, 2026
Trump had announced in July that Washington would give Ukraine “the right to make Patriots” – after Zelensky had for at least six months been relentless in requesting this, framing it as urgent and for the protection of cities and civilians. But such local production would take years to tool and set up, with the reality of a nightly air war making the prospect daunting.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/03/2026 – 04:15
