President Donald Trump backed away from a promise to let Ukraine manufacture its own Patriot air defense interceptors, telling reporters on Friday during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David that the United States has “not agreed to” granting Kyiv a license to build the missiles domestically.
Asked whether he was ready to grant the license, something he had suggested at a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month and which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as a productive topic in their White House meeting on Tuesday, Trump was noncommittal. “We have not agreed to that,” he said. “We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”
The president warned that sharing the technology carried its own risks. “Those people that you get that technology, they can someday turn on you. You know, that is possible,” he said, according to accounts of the exchange. He described the interceptor as traveling at 8,600 miles per hour and claimed “nobody else has that capacity.”
Trump said Washington “will be building many plants” to produce Patriot and Tomahawk missiles domestically, just not, for now, in Ukraine. He also touched on the ongoing US confrontation with Iran, telling reporters the United States would be “hitting them very hard” if negotiations broke down, and dismissing Iran’s military as having little capability left.
The reversal is likely to unsettle Kyiv, which has spent the past year lobbying for both more interceptors and the means to produce its own, amid a global shortage that has been compounded by the volume of Patriot and Tomahawk stock expended in Washington’s conflict with Iran. Ukraine has relied on Western-supplied Patriot batteries to defend its cities and energy infrastructure from Russian missile and drone attacks since the opening months of the war, and its officials have repeatedly pressed Washington to allow domestic production to reduce dependence on foreign deliveries.
The decision came days after Trump met Zelenskyy at the White House and hours after Vice President JD Vance spoke with the Ukrainian leader. Zelenskyy described the call as “productive,” according to the Kyiv Post, even as Trump wavered on the production license, saying the United States must be “very careful” about sharing the technology.
The about-face underscores how sensitive the transfer of advanced US weapons technology has become, a debate that has intensified as Washington weighs how much support to give Kyiv while managing its own stockpiles and its separate confrontation with Iran. It also leaves unresolved one of Ukraine’s most sought-after asks at a moment when air defense capacity is central to its survival strategy.
Sources: The Guardian, The Guardian live blog
Author: USA Desk
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