The State Department on Friday approved the possible sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor missiles to Ukraine for an estimated $2.1 billion, weeks after Kyiv’s supply of the missiles ran out.
Washington isn’t paying for them. Ukraine will cover the cost with money from Canada, Germany and Norway, plus a loan from the European Union, the department said in a release, and the sale is neither subsidized nor financed by the United States, as CNN reported. The package also covers spare parts and logistics support.
The three countries are sending their share through a multinational program called JUMPSTART, and the rest comes from national funds backed by the EU’s Ukraine Support Loan, Inside Defense reported. The department didn’t say how the bill would be split.
The PAC-3 MSE is the most advanced Patriot in service. It’s also one of the few weapons that can knock down an incoming ballistic missile, and Russia fires those at Ukraine constantly. In a video posted to social media on Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned the Patriot shortage and said Russia had launched 17 ballistic missiles overnight, some of which struck oil refining infrastructure in central Ukraine.
The release didn’t say when the interceptors would arrive. The Ukrainian news site Censor.net, which did not name its sources, reported that they might not be handed over until after 2030. That could not be independently verified. By Defence Blog’s estimate, 500 missiles is roughly 10 months of what Lockheed Martin, the Patriot’s maker, produced at its 2025 pace.
Nor did the release say whether any parts would be built in Ukraine under a so-called offset agreement. The State Department said it was “not aware” of any such deal between Kyiv and Lockheed, but that the two could negotiate one directly.
That’s a step back from July. At the NATO summit in Turkey, President Trump said Ukraine would get a license to make its own Patriot missiles, which could eventually take pressure off American production lines strained by the Iran war and rising demand abroad. A Ukrainian interceptor plant could take years to build, and Mr. Trump has since appeared to retreat from the idea, as the timeline for local production slipped. Censor.net reported that the Pentagon was still reviewing whether to grant the license.
The approval follows weeks of friction between the two governments. This month Mr. Trump announced a deal letting Russian diesel back onto world markets and waived a new set of sanctions on Russian fossil fuel sales that had only just become law. Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Trump had chosen “the wrong side”. Mr. Trump also threatened to cut off intelligence to Kyiv over its strikes on Russian refineries, and Ukraine’s access to the Starshield satellite system was throttled for a time before it was restored last week.
Al Jazeera described the package as one of the biggest steps toward arming Kyiv with defensive weapons since Mr. Trump began his second term in January 2025.
For Mr. Zelensky, it’s what he has been asking Western leaders for over and over. In an August interview with CNN, he said that selling Ukraine even a small slice of the American Patriot stockpile would be enough to “destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles.”
The State Department said the sale would not hurt U.S. defense readiness. Congress has been notified, and lawmakers have 30 days to review the deal and possibly block it.