NATO’s secretary general promised Ukraine air defenses on Thursday, and the promise ran straight into the arithmetic of the war. Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities overnight. The attack killed at least 17 people. Ukrainian air defenses caught 98 of the 115 drones and none of the ballistic missiles. Through July, Kyiv was hit every three days on average. Mark Rutte said the alliance is working to get Ukraine the air defenses it urgently needs, words that have been spoken in various forms since the first winter of the war.
President Volodymyr Zelensky used a meeting on winter resilience to lay out the other side of the equation: Russia is trying to raise missile production before the cold weather, when Moscow is expected to go back to attacking Ukraine’s energy system. He said allied shipments of air defense missiles in the first six months of this year ran at barely a third of last year’s pace. He did not rule out that the withholding was deliberate, a way to soften Ukraine for peace talks. He said that every day, people’s lives in Ukraine depend on the resolve of partners in Europe and the United States.
A presidential adviser, Serhii Beskrestnov, put a number on the threat: Russia can launch about 100 ballistic missiles a month at warehouses, industrial sites and logistics hubs. His verdict was blunt: the war of attrition has entered its next phase.
The technical gap is small and cruel. The Patriot is the only system in Ukrainian service that can stop the missiles Russia favors, the Iskander-M, the S-400 and the Zircon. Moscow pairs its ballistic weapons with cruise missiles, swarms of drones and decoys to make defenders spend scarce interceptors on the wrong targets. Ukraine says it has too few batteries and too few missiles for the job.
The shortage changes how Ukraine fights. Commanders ration interceptors, saving them for the most dangerous targets and letting lesser threats through, because every missile spent is a missile that cannot stop the next Iskander. The drones and decoys in every Russian salvo exist to force exactly that choice. The result is a defense that works on paper and leaks in practice.
The shortages did not come from nowhere. The American war with Iran has consumed Patriot missiles at a brutal rate. AP estimates the American interceptor stock is down at least 65 percent from its pre-war level, and the Gulf states alone burned through more than 1,100 interceptors during the opening months of the Iran war. Missiles that once flowed to Ukraine now feed two other fires.
Production is the long pole. Lockheed Martin delivered more than 600 of its newest interceptors last year and wants production capacity of 2,000 a year by 2030. The first Patriot assembly line in Europe is expected to open in Germany next month. None of that helps Ukraine this winter. Even optimists measure new capacity in years, and the factories are not the only bottleneck: allies hesitate to hand over interceptors they may need themselves, as the New York Times reported Thursday. Rutte himself has acknowledged the limit, saying there is only so much to go around on NATO territory.
The politics are just as stuck. At last month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Trump said Washington would license Ukraine to build Patriots. About three weeks later he said he had made no final decision. Reuters reports the talks are still alive, including a scheme for Ukraine to make components that would be assembled in Europe, which is more than can be said for the missiles themselves.
So NATO has promised urgency, and the promise has met its limit in the same place it always does: nobody has enough interceptors to share, and the factories are not fast enough. Winter does not wait for the alliance’s timetable, and neither, by the sound of it, does the Russian defense industry.