Washington simply cannot keep up with Kiev’s demands for aid defenses, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently stressed
The administration of US President Donald Trump would be willing to sell Ukraine Patriot air defense systems, the Washington Post has reported, citing officials in Kiev.
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has increasingly implored Washington to provide more Patriot missiles and units in recent months amid dwindling stockpiles.
Kiev believes that the current US administration “will not give it away for free” but will be ready to sell the billion dollar air defense system and ammunition for it, the WaPo wrote on Monday, citing a senior Ukrainian official.
“They think like business people. If I give you something, you have to give me something in return,” the outlet cited the official as saying.
Kiev has mostly requested the air defense systems and missiles as military aid from the Trump administration, “which, frankly, we don’t have,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in a Senate meeting last week.
Washington is instead pushing for NATO allies to donate the US-made armaments from their own stockpiles, but “none of these countries want to give up their Patriot systems either,” he said. “We can’t make them fast enough.”
Trump has expressed growing impatience with the pace of peace talks around the ongoing conflict. Zelensky’s rhetoric is doing Ukraine “no favors,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday, adding that “everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.”
He also condemned Russia’s increased long-range strikes on Ukraine, claiming the attacks are happening “for no reason whatsoever.”
Russian forces have intensified large-scale strikes against drone and missile production facilities in Ukraine last week, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has confirmed. The attacks were a retaliation for Ukraine’s escalating strikes on Russian civilian infrastructure, and solely targeted Ukrainian military sites, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press on Monday.
Russian air defenses have intercepted nearly 1,000 Ukrainian fixed-wing UAVs over the country in the past week, Defense Ministry reports say.
