Seventeen Patriot Systems Could Be Quickly Sent to Ukraine, Europeans Paying – Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump has stated that up to 17 MIM-104 Patriot long range air defence systems could be donated to equip the Ukrainian Armed Forces. “A couple of countries who have Patriots are going to swap them out. We have one country that has 17 Patriots getting ready to be shipped. They’re not going to need them. So we’re going to work again where the 17 will go, or a big portion of the 17 will go,” he stated, adding “That could be done very quickly.” It remains uncertain which country was being referred to, as no country is known to have ordered such large quantities of systems, which would collectively cost close to $40 billion. One possibility is that the president was referring to launchers, rather than systems, as each system is usually comprised of eight launchers. Although severe shortages of Patriot systems in the United States and the exhaustion of European arsenals were previously expected to ensure that no major deliveries to Ukraine would be forthcoming for the foreseeable future, the possibility remains that a European client, such as Switzerland, agreeing to have its supplies delayed to allow the systems to reach Ukraine faster.

Further elaborating on plans to supply Patriot systems, the President Trump observed: “We make the best equipment, the best missiles, the best of everything.”“The European nations know that, and we made a deal today … where we’re going to be sending them weapons, but they’re going to be paying for them,”he added. A leading uncertainty remains the extent to which the United States and other clients for the Patriot will be willing to delay supplies to their own forces to equip Ukraine, as this could allow a much greater proportion of the relatively limited productive capacity for the systems to be allocated to arming the Eastern European country. The U.S. Army’s shortages of surface-to-air missiles from large scale supplies to Ukraine were exacerbated by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ballistic missile strike on a U.S. Air Force facility, Al Udeid Airbase in Qatar, on June 23, which saw Patriot systems launch dozens of interceptors to shoot down the incoming barrage.

The cost effectiveness of investing in supplies of Patriot systems to Ukraine has repeatedly been brought to question, due to both its tremendous expense at close to $2.5 billion per system, and due to the significant performance deficiencies which have been demonstrated. Patriots have suffered high attrition rates in combat, with the Russian Iskander-M ballistic missilesystem having been used to target the launcher, command, and radar vehicles, and havingbeen singled out in Ukrainian Air Force reports for its ability to evade interception. The Russian ballistic missile system was first confirmed to have successfully destroyed a Patriot system on February 23, 2024, with a subsequent strike destroying another system near the Sergeevka locality the following month. New footage in July 2024 confirmed the destruction of two batteries in the Odessa region. On August 11 three more batteries and an AN/MPQ-65 radar were reported destroyed in Iskander-M strikes. One of the Iskander-M’s more recent successes saw the destruction of the Patriot’s AN/MPQ-65 multifunctional radar station, combat control cabin, and missile launch vehicles in the Dnepropetrovsk region.