President Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday he would grant Kyiv a license to make its own critically needed Patriot air-defense missiles, joking: “This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough.”
“One of the things I think we’re going to be talking about today, a little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” Trump said ahead of his closed-door sitdown with Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey.
Trump estimated that the US could get Ukraine up and running with Patriot production by this fall.
“We’ll show them how to do it. It’s very complex, actually, but it’s — you’ll figure out the complexity quickly, and we’re talking about that,” Trump said. “The company that makes them, which is building now four plants, you know — all of our companies will be able to do this in two to three months”
Patriot missiles have long been in short supply, but now are running critically low — forcing Ukraine in recent days to let Russian missiles strike Kyiv without interception.
