A residential building damaged by a Russian missile strike in Kyiv on July 6. (Genya Savilov/AFP)
Early Monday, Russia fired a large salvo of attack drones and missiles at Ukraine, killing at least 22 people — most of them in Kyiv, where rescuers pulled bodies from collapsed apartment blocks.
Ukraine’s defenses had swatted down most of the drones. But of the 29 ballistic and hypersonic missiles in the barrage, they intercepted exactly zero. Compare that to three weeks ago, when Ukraine managed to shoot down 15 of the 19 Russian ballistic missiles lobbed at its capital.
That’s because Ukraine is out of Patriots, the U.S.-made air defense missiles it has used to defend itself since 2023. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t mince words. “As long as Patriot missiles remain in our allies’ stockpiles,” he said in a statement on Monday, “Russia is only encouraged to keep ‘vanquishing’ residential buildings.”
Zelensky is right. The main impediment to peace is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Negotiators say the outlines of a deal to stop the fighting are visible. But Putin has dug in his heels, demanding Ukraine hand over territory his army has failed to seize by force.
The shortage of Patriot interceptors gives Russia a lift. The Iran war has badly depleted U.S. stockpiles. Analysts project Patriot stocks won’t recover for years despite welcome ramp-ups in production and warn that replenishment will take precedence over deliveries to allies.
Trump has insisted that the United States will no longer pay to arm Ukraine. He need not go back on his word to help Ukraine’s stockpiles recover. Under the mechanism his own administration built — the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List program — allies foot the bill for American weapons.
The hard problem isn’t money; it’s fear. European governments hold interceptors that could be handed to Kyiv in weeks. But that would make a hole in their own defenses. Many European governments don’t trust that Washington, busy refilling its Iran-drained magazines, will ever help them rearm.
That fear is Trump’s to dispel. At the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, he can make allies a simple promise: Any country that releases Patriot interceptors to Ukraine would move to the front of the line as production ramps up.
The promise would have to be more than words. Allies have heard assurances about armaments before and watched timelines stretch further and further into the future. It would need to be paired with delivery contracts. The administration could also expand licensing for European production lines; facilities for Patriot interceptors are already being built in Germany.
That of course will mean U.S. plans to replenish its own supplies may have to slip, perhaps to the end of the decade. The Pentagon’s fastest path back to pre-Iran stocks — mid-2028 by some estimates — assumes every new missile goes to American stockpiles and none to allies.
That slippage is not trivial, but the Trump administration chose to burn through U.S. defenses by going to war with Iran. Now the Pentagon finds itself with thinner margins than any military planner likes to see.
That is the cost of an inconclusive war of choice. But standing by as Kyiv gets battered will underline for both Moscow and Beijing that determination pays dividends. More adventurism is likely to follow.
Getting Patriots to Ukraine can help conclude a bloody conflict that continues to chew through lives and money. Putin’s war machine has stalled on the battlefield, and Russian civilians are feeling the sting as Ukrainian drone strikes targeting oil refineries reach deeper and deeper into Russia’s heartland.
Leaning into the allied effort to bring Putin to the table is a calculated risk worth taking. Letting Putin believe he can win more concessions from the air only prolongs the carnage.
Ukrainian and European officials say President Vladimir V. Putin has become emboldened by a lack of Western pushback. The police inspected the damage to a house caused by debris from a shot-down Russian drone in the village of Wyryki-Wola, eastern Poland on Wednesday. Credit... Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images By Andrew E. Kramer Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine The New York Times , Sept. 11, 2025 Updated 8:49 a.m. ET An American factory in western Ukraine. Two European diplomatic compounds and a key Ukrainian government building in Kyiv. And now Poland. Over a roughly three-week period, Russian drones and missiles have struck sites of increasing sensitivity for Ukraine and its Western allies, culminating in the volley of Russian drones that buzzed early Wednesday over Poland, a NATO country. For decades, American and European military planners feared something else: a bolt-from-the-blue assault, like an all-out nuclear strike, from the Soviet Union or ...
A bold Ukrainian operation in Kursk has humiliated Russian President Vladimir Putin and upended some of the logic of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Column by Ishaan Tharoor The Washington Post , August 14, 2024 at 12:00 a.m. EDT; see also Ukrainian soldiers pose for a picture as they repair a military vehicle near the Russian border on Sunday. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters) Russia’s Kursk oblast is no stranger to war. In medieval times, the district was overrun by the Mongol horde, and was claimed and ceded down the centuries by Eurasian empires. During World War II, the environs of the city of Kursk became the site of the greatest tank battle in history, as Nazi Germany suffered a grievous strategic defeat at the hands of the bloodied yet unbowed Soviet Union . This past week, Kursk has been the site of the first major invasion of Russian territory since then. This time, it’s not the Nazi war machine rolling in — no matter what Kremlin propagandists insi...
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