By admin 
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to have a decently cordial White House meeting on July 28. The subject was the Ukrainian president’s request for a license to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air interceptor missiles. But two days after the meeting, Trump made a point of deflating any positive expectations he might have generated in Kyiv.
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“It’s a very extraordinary weapon,” Trump said of the Patriot system in an interview with the Financial Times, and “we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.” The implication was that Ukraine was not to be trusted.
Then, in another seeming reversal on August 8, Zelensky suggested in a post on X that Trump had agreed to grant the license: “We have now reached an agreement with President Trump that he will grant the licenses, but imagine if we had received them four years ago. By now, we would already be producing Patriots for everyone.” As of this writing, Washington has not confirmed that Trump has decided on a license agreement. But granting this request would make perfect sense given Ukraine’s military evolution.
Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine has never been favorable, but every once in a while, he seems to be ready to do something positive for it. Then a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin, or a visit by Trump’s plenipotentiary Steve Witkoff to Moscow, appears to rekindle his hostility toward the embattled country, along with his wishful thinking that Putin is serious about pursuing peace. (U.S. intelligence consistently assesses that he isn’t.) Before the talk of a Patriot license, there was a much-hyped Ukrainian request for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which Trump publicly weighed before unceremoniously declining during another Zelensky visit to the White House, in October.
But this time around, something has changed. The Ukrainian military position is stronger than it has been in years. The country has become more autonomous. It produces many of its own weapons and is holding off Russian advances and even winning back territory in some areas. And it has taken the war to Russia, despite having fewer soldiers and more finite resources than its enemy has.
These and other feats have left Ukraine looking less like a NATO supplicant than an invaluable source of military technology and know-how. If any country in Europe has the incentive and expertise to become a crucial node in America’s military supply chain, it’s Ukraine. You might even call Kyiv a “model ally,” to borrow a term applied to Israel by Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. security assistance to Kyiv.
The question is whether the Trump administration recognizes this—or still imagines that it holds all of the cards. Granting Ukraine the Patriot license wouldn’t be a concession to a dependent state fighting an unwinnable war: It could well be the start of a manufacturing arrangement that would end up serving the United States.
The past year has brought an encouraging turnaround in the war in Ukraine. Russia still terrorizes Ukrainian cities with ballistic-missile attacks, which grow deadlier as Ukraine’s stocks of interceptors dwindle. But Kyiv has successfully used drones to block major Russian offensive operations on the front lines. Moscow has opted for infiltration tactics instead, sending small groups of two to four soldiers through the gaps in Ukraine’s defenses to occupy abandoned trenches, buildings, or other positions from which to harass the defending army.
Ukraine is giving as good as it gets. It has struck oil refineries and export terminals as far away as Siberia—also air bases and strategic Russian industries, including Wildberries, an Amazon-style online retailer, some of whose inventory can be put to military as well as civilian use. These drone strikes have left smoking wreckage thousands of miles from Kyiv. They have also produced fuel rationing, pump closures, and long, snaking queues all over Russia, which is facing its worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow had to close its airports temporarily due to nightly Ukrainian-drone swarms, leading Zelensky to joke to reporters that the Russian capital was an unsafe venue for any peace talks.
On its own territory, Ukraine’s situation has gone from dire to manageable. Despite shortages of personnel and some shuffling of the military command, Ukraine has blunted the Russian advance in the Donbas, the eastern region that Witkoff, J.D. Vance, and Trump once urged Kyiv to consider lost. Russia’s rate of territorial advance has slowed in the past year. Black Bird Group, a Finnish war monitor, calculated that Russian forces captured “nearly five times as much territory” last July as they did this July, and actually lost more ground than they seized in February and June of this year.
Russian logistics in southern Ukraine, particularly the transportation of fuel, weapons, and other combustible material, have been so disrupted that the Ukrainians have dubbed the main artery connecting Russia to occupied Crimea the “Highway of Death.” Ukrainian drones have intercepted maritime traffic to the peninsula as well, hitting 129 vessels associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and another 72 in the Black Sea in the past month of overnight strikes. Twenty-four-hour blackouts are now commonplace in Crimea because of Ukrainian attacks on substations and the regional energy grid.
Ukraine has gotten savvier about communications as well. Since last year, it has been deliberately delaying reporting its territorial gains, to avoid drawing Russian resources to parts of the front line that may be softening. Kyiv has similarly become more strategic in its approach to Trump. A Ukrainian official, who asked for his name to be withheld because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, told me that Kyiv now understands Trump as a transactional player, and its outreach aims to keep the American president from upending a status quo that’s working rather than appeal to humanitarian or moral imperatives.
If Trump once had the leverage to force a dismal peace on Ukraine, he has since relinquished it. The United States doesn’t pay for the war anymore—Europe does. Trump reduced new commitments of U.S. military aid to Ukraine by 99 percent in his first year back in office, Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy determined. NATO has a mechanism that allows member states to fund the purchase of U.S. weapons for Ukrainian use, but this has so far accounted for only $6.7 billion in assistance, a fraction of the $127 billion that the Biden administration and Congress allocated to Ukraine.
The shortfall has become less salient as the dynamics of the war have changed, and as Ukraine has developed the capacity to manufacture its own weapons at scale. Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me that more than 80 percent of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, the bulk of which Ukraine produces itself. Last month, the Ukrainian government approved exporting weapons and defense tech for the first time since the full-scale invasion began, in February 2022. The reason, according to Politico, is that the country now produces more weapons than it can afford to buy from its own companies. Forty to 70 percent of what’s manufactured sits unused in warehouses.
Ukraine has become a global epicenter for military robotics. A single team of about 10 Ukrainians “eliminated” two mechanized NATO battalions in one day in an exercise in Estonia in May 2025, and “destroyed Sweden’s troops” in a war game on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea a year later. Zelensky estimates that Ukraine currently produces about 10 million drones a year; contrast that with the United States’ 100,000. Some of these munitions, such as Darts, cost as little as $1,000 to make but have taken out Russian targets worth millions.
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Ukrainian technicians have upgraded some American products to achieve all of this. The Hornet is a $5,000 drone developed by Perennial Autonomy, a company founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It carries an 11-pound warhead and can travel 124 miles. Ukraine’s Azov Corps MacGyvered the Hornet, the Kyiv Independent reported, by using commercial Starlink satellite terminals to expand its range and lower its susceptibility to Russian jamming.
So formidable is Ukraine’s drone game that even the country’s onetime detractors now want in on the action. One Florida-based drone company, Powerus, is looking for Ukrainian hardware and licenses and includes two noteworthy investors: Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Ukraine is only too happy to share its inventions and know-how. It came to America’s defense in a war of choice against Iran that many NATO allies have wanted little to do with. Early in the war, U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf sustained significant damage from Iranian drone attacks, and Ukraine reportedly sent technical advisers to the region to install and operate Kyiv’s cutting-edge Sky Map system, which uses acoustics and AI to detect and down incoming drones. Ukraine has since signed security- and defense-cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
America’s offensive drone campaign against Iran now involves repurposing civilian technology for military use, much as Ukraine has done. One U.S. military officer who was deployed to the Persian Gulf until recently told me that the U.S. military has been buying Starlink terminals from local shopping malls and affixing them to aerial drones and unmanned surface vessels. The reason? They’re cheaper and easier to use than SpaceX’s “hard” Pentagon-controlled variant, Starshield.
As new reporting in The Atlantic disclosed on July 30, Zelensky has prevailed on Trump to ask Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink when striking deep into Russia. The Ukrainians aren’t seeking anything that will cost U.S. taxpayers: just the go-ahead to use their homegrown munitions to greater effect and, in the absence of interceptors, take out Russian missile launchers before they fire their payloads. Granting this request could even bring a windfall to the Pentagon and the CIA.
The one thing the United States still provides free of charge, according to both American and Ukrainian sources, is intelligence, including the targeting packages for strikes on Russian-troop positions in Ukraine and on energy infrastructure inside Russia. Credit for this policy goes to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is said to impress the president on the golf links with eye-popping data about Russian losses on the battlefield, now in excess of 40,000 a month. Ratcliffe’s explanation for his success, one Western intelligence official told me, is that “Trump doesn’t like losers.” So long as Ukraine is seen to be winning and defying the conventional wisdom of those who insist it can’t, the president’s inclination to cut and run is mitigated.
Trump should also welcome the toll that Ukrainian strikes are taking on Russia’s energy economy. Moscow’s reduction in oil exports could leave countries such as India and China more vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs. And the president has begged Europeans to end their dependency on Russian oil and gas since his first term in office, going so far as to sanction the Nord Stream pipeline. Zelensky calls his nightly salvos on Russian refineries “long-range sanctions.” Trump may even view bombing as a prelude to negotiations, much as he has in Iran. “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end,” he said of Ukraine’s deep strikes at the NATO summit in Ankara last month.
The intertwining of the wars in Iran and Ukraine has demonstrated that a recipient of U.S. security assistance can also be a provider of security assistance to the United States. But the one thing Ukraine can’t yet source domestically in sufficient quantities is ballistic-missile defense, and U.S. supplies of the Patriot systems used for this purpose are also strained.
The United States has burned through about two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot systems in the Middle East in the past six months, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia, which has been giving the Iranians targeting packages for use against U.S. soldiers in the region, knows this and continues to bombard Ukrainians with missiles, killing civilians in their homes. Last month, it fired 376 missiles, more than twice as many as it did in June, many of them aimed at Kyiv. Almost all are getting through, as Patriot batteries—most numerous around the capital—run out of interceptors.
“The Ukrainians have active development programs for almost everything they need, and their intention is to be totally self-sufficient in the future,” Colby Badhwar, an independent security analyst, told me. However, he said, “right now they are still almost entirely reliant on allies for interceptors.”
Even if the U.S. were to grant Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriots, doing so at scale would take Ukraine years. That’s why Zelensky has been pursuing immediate resupplies of Patriot missiles in tandem with longer-term solutions. Zelensky reportedly asked Trump for “several hundred” interceptors at the Oval Office meeting on July 28; Trump refused, citing America’s shrunken stocks and U.S. priorities in the Middle East.
The Ukrainian journalist Tim Zadorozhnyy has reported that Zelensky first broached a Patriot license in the waning months of the Biden administration. Senior Ukrainian officials evidently put the proposal to Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary at the time, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, but were rebuffed without explanation. (Zelensky has now claimed that he also requested a license from Biden in the first year of the war.)
Granting the license would make Washington both a guarantor of Ukraine’s security and a beneficiary of its productive capacity. The former industrial hub of the Soviet Union would pay good money to become a helpmeet to the U.S. defense industry. It’s one of the few nations in Europe still lining up to do so. When its war is over, Ukraine could manufacture surplus Patriots for U.S. use or for resale to U.S. allies and partners. Given its track record, Ukraine might even be able to produce surpluses while the war rages on. And that might be the problem.
Zelensky’s post on X on August 8 suggested that the main hold-up with the Trump administration was bureaucracy and “paperwork.” On the Hill, one Republican official in favor of the license told me about an unreported hiccup in the deal. Raytheon and Lockheed, the makers of the Patriot system, “will officially frame their concerns around IP theft and tech transfer,” he said, but “their real worry is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then produce them at scale faster and for much less money than what the existing production lines in the U.S. could do.”