Trump Says Ukraine Will Get a License to Produce Patriot Missiles on Its Own Soil

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Washington intends to grant Ukraine a license to domestically produce interceptors for the Patriot air defense system — a move he described as aimed at bolstering Ukraine's capacity to counter Russian ballistic missile attacks and reduce its dependence on American weapons supplies.

Trump made the announcement during the NATO summit in Ankara, in the course of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. "We will give you a license to produce Patriot," Trump said, adding: "I think they'll be able to produce them very quickly, once we explain to them how." He acknowledged that he had not yet consulted the system's manufacturers — Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — but expressed confidence that "in the end, it will work out."

The Patriot system ranks among the most sophisticated air defense platforms in the world, designed to detect and intercept ballistic and cruise missiles. It is also among the most costly: a single battery, including interceptors, is valued at approximately one billion dollars. Production capacity is a further constraint — according to the U.S. Department of Defense, only around 600 interceptors are manufactured annually, a rate that has struggled to keep pace with wartime demand.

Trump was candid about the limits of American stockpiles: "We have Patriot systems, but we don't have that many. We need them for ourselves too." According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the United States expended more than half of its Patriot interceptor inventory during its confrontation with Iran earlier this year, making Washington increasingly cautious about further transfers. The licensing arrangement, Trump suggested, would also reduce Ukrainian dependency on American supply chains: "So they won't be able to complain that we're not giving them enough."

The announcement was met with measured skepticism in Kyiv. Military analyst Ivan Stupak, a former officer in Ukraine's security services, told the BBC that while the Patriot system is indispensable to Ukraine's air defenses, "unfortunately, Ukraine is not capable of producing advanced ammunition of this kind — this is extraordinarily complex equipment that sits at the very frontier of military technology." He added that from both a technical and legal standpoint, production would likely need to take place in a European country under external supervision — a process that could take many months to materialize.

At the same press conference, Trump addressed Ukraine's growing capacity to conduct deep-strike operations inside Russian territory, hitting targets thousands of kilometers from the front line. "It's an escalation," he said, "but it's also an escalation that could help bring the war to an end."