By Michael Weiss
Sunday, August 09, 2026
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.
“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.
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.
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