Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the waiting is over. Donald Trump, he announced on Friday, has made his “final decision” and will let Ukraine produce Patriot air defence missiles on its own soil — after months of yes, then no. “At our last meeting, President Trump emphasised to me that yes, I have made a final decision. Ukraine will receive licences for the production of Patriot missiles,” Zelenskyy said in a voice note to journalists, sent during his visit to the United States this week, where he renewed his calls for air defence support.
In July, Trump said granting the licences would be “pretty cool,” then backtracked, saying the United States should be “very careful.” The hesitations matter because Patriots remain the only system reliably able to counter Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Kyiv has suffered an acute shortage of the interceptors since February, when the United States and Israel went to war with Iran and supplies of the advanced systems were diverted. Even if the licences are now granted, they solve nothing quickly: establishing the industrial capacity would take more than a year and would not meet immediate needs. With winter coming, Zelenskyy said last month that Ukraine needs 5 per cent of America’s Patriot interceptor missiles to get through it, and 10 per cent to destroy all of Russia’s ballistic projectiles.
What the winter holds arrived early on Friday morning, as people in Kyiv were making their way to work. A drone struck a residential building and killed a 14-year-old boy. Zelenskyy denounced it as “an absolutely savage and sickening strike, devoid of any military logic.” AFP journalists at the scene saw residents gathered around the multi-storey block, its ninth- and tenth-floor flats left charred.
Mykyta Sysoyev, a 23-year-old IT specialist, was woken by the explosion and learned from the news that the strike had hit his own building. “My jaw dropped a bit,” he said. “It’s strange: on the one hand, I’ve got used to it, but on the other, people are constantly dying.” Of the rising tempo of strikes, he added: “This is a technological race and a technological war...Unfortunately, people will suffer while we’re searching for solutions.”
Moscow is now sending newly developed, jet-powered drones at the capital — machines that have bypassed some of the drone-interception systems Ukraine has built, the jet drones outrunning the defences. Where it once attacked mainly in the hours of darkness, it now often strikes in broad daylight. In the southern region of Odesa, authorities said another person was killed in a repeated strike on a postal facility.
A licence is not a missile. It buys a factory that would take more than a year to build, while the need is counted in percentage points of someone else’s stock and the clocks are set by winter. On Friday morning a drone got through, and a boy of 14 did not.