Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Trump Agrees to Support Ukraine's L...

Ukraine could launch domestic production of missiles for Patriot air defense systems within approximately one to one and a half years, following U.S. support for the necessary licensing

Trump has agreed again to allow Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles. I wonder if he will renege like last time?

It will take time to get this production going but its more a long term objective for Ukraine

18 hours ago, BruceVC said:

Trump has agreed again to allow Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles. I wonder if he will renege like last time?

It will take time to get this production going but its more a long term objective for Ukraine

I wonder if they will bother producing them? They are costly, so it might be more cost-effective for Ukraine to just keep mass producing drones to take down the Russian economy instead of trying to intercept inbound missiles.

The consequences of trying to take down Russia's economy have been far worse for Ukraine than Russia. They now need nearly the entire EU aid package which they had so much trouble approving last year- and projected to last for the next two years- this year. Economic activity is utterly paralyzed; no warehouse space, their main exports cannot be exported- agriculture- or have been destroyed recently (metallurgy etc). Indeed, it was particularly dumb to start the campaign when there was an interceptor shortage, and the Russians had increased capabilities like mass produced Geran4/5s

Best indicator of how things are actually going on that front: Zelensky has been begging for an infrastructure/ maritime/ energy truce, for weeks, including today at the UN. The maritime one is particularly ironic, since Ukraine had one until they broke it; and we got a lot of people saying Russia could not enforce a blockade even if it wanted to. Well, that aged like milk.

(In terms of Patriot production, even if it actually approved- and personally, I'd be surprised if it were- it's... The thing about the drones is that they can be manufactured in Birmingham or Munich, shipped in by train and then assembled, in a shed, by a couple of guys with drills. And that's only a slight exaggeration. You occasionally see people driving around with medium range drones literally on their utes (ie pickups), not something you can do with a Patriot type missile.

The equivalent system to Patriot would be the Flamingo or their domestic ballistic missile (Grom) or their domestic anti ship cruise missiles (Neptune). None of whose production is anywhere near the levels required for Patriot production, because they need large production facilities, which are constantly being hit. Indeed, that will likely be worse for Patriot, because they will need a large volume of them and while you can fire off most of those other missiles from anywhere (well, within reason) in Ukraine most Patriots will be going to defend a static target in Kiev, and that makes tracing their source far easier)