The United States is in talks with Ukraine about granting licences for local production of missiles for Patriot air defence systems.
This was stated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, European Pravda reports.
At the same time, the head of the US diplomatic service stressed that obtaining a licence will not meet Ukraine’s urgent needs in the short term. According to him, building specialised factories and establishing production of such complex weapons is a lengthy process that takes several years.
Rubio confirmed that the countries are continuing their dialogue on the issue, but underlined the need to find additional solutions to meet Ukraine’s current defence requirements.
- Ukraine is short of interceptor missiles for the MIM-104 Patriot system. It is the only system in Ukraine capable of effectively shooting down Iskander-M, Kinzhal and Zircon missiles flying on ballistic and quasi-ballistic trajectories. As a result, there is a trend towards declining effectiveness in countering these types of missiles.
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy previously said that over three years, supplies of Patriot missiles to Ukraine have fallen by more than half.
- At a meeting between Zelenskyy and Donald Trump in July, the US leader said the United States would consider granting licences to produce Patriot missiles.
- Financial Times later reported that the United States has still not made a final decision on transferring the technology to Ukraine.
- Soon afterwards, Trump struck a more cautious tone on producing interceptors — the White House chief said that “this is an extremely powerful weapon, and we have to be somewhat careful about who we grant a licence to”.
- In May this year, Poland received preliminary approval from the US State Department to produce missiles for Patriot systems. The country said it has the necessary manufacturing capacity and is ready to begin producing PAC-3 for air defence systems on its territory.