President Trump has agreed to grant Ukraine the licenses to manufacture its own Patriot missiles, a critical air-defense system that intercepts incoming projectiles from Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
“There are concrete agreements regarding Patriot licenses,” Zelensky posted Friday on X. “At our meeting, President Trump stressed that he had made his final decision: Ukraine will receive licenses to produce Patriot missiles.”
In addition to the US, only Japan, Germany and Poland currently have the ability to produce the air-defense missile systems. Until now, Ukraine has been dependent on the US and other allies to supply Kyiv.
The wartime Ukrainian leader met with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to discuss Patriot licenses as well as other armaments, which Zelensky mentioned were necessary ahead of the long months of winter fighting ahead.
“We asked the president to help us to move this quicker,” Zelensky later told reporters, adding that one of his military advisers had recently met with defense contractor Raytheon and “an Israeli company” about the Patriot licenses.
“There’s a big deficit for everybody,” he revealed of the Patriot supply chain. “We will work also with other countries.”
Ukraine’s president affirmed that his forces agreed to an energy cease-fire and were demanding trilateral talks with the US and Russia on a path to wind down the more than four-year war.
In his Friday post, Zelensky said that his negotiators were gonig to brief European officials while the US discussed next steps with the Russians “and in ten days, we will come back with views and results in some shape or form.”
“As for a trilateral Ukraine-U.S.-Russia meeting, the American side proposed preparing it and meeting at the technical level. We are waiting for the United States to propose a date,” he added. “The United States proposed the United Arab Emirates as the venue for such a meeting.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested it is “possible in the near term” to hold such a meeting, a Kremlin spokesman said Friday.
The UN summit followed Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s diesel facilities, with Moscow retaliating against civilian targets in Kyiv.
Ukraine again struck Russian oil refineries later Friday in response to Moscow’s drone attack on a Kyiv office building.
Ukraine’s energy minister Denys Shmyhal has also claimed that Russia is planning to knock out Kyiv’s energy systems during the winter, the Kyiv Post reported.
Trump signaled during a NATO summit in July that the US was going to provide the license for Ukraine to produce its own Patriot interceptors.
“This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough,” the president joked to Zelensky.
