When Volodymyr Zelensky left the White House on Thursday, he told the world that Donald Trump had agreed to license Patriot missile production to Ukraine. By Friday, Trump had told the world something rather different. The US president said no such agreement had been reached, and that Washington had to be "very careful" about permitting another country to manufacture the system. The gap between those two statements is not merely diplomatic awkwardness; for a country absorbing thirty to forty ballistic missiles in a single night, it is a matter of survival.

Ukraine's deputy prime minister, Olha Stefanishyna, had already outlined the scale of the problem at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington. She explained that even if a production licence were granted, the process of actually building Patriot PAC-3 interceptors on Ukrainian soil could take between one and five years. In the meantime, Kyiv is exploring a shorter route: purchasing PAC-3 missiles directly and, crucially, swapping its place in the manufacturer's production queue with another buyer. Officials from Raytheon, which makes the Patriot system, have visited Ukraine, and Lockheed Martin — the company that builds the PAC-3 interceptor itself — was preparing to send a team of experts to Kyiv.

The urgency is sharpened by a grim statistical backdrop. According to the United Nations, last month was the deadliest for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022. Russia, Stefanishyna noted, has been rapidly expanding its ballistic missile output under President Vladimir Putin, and Ukraine currently has no reliable defence against that category of weapon.