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Zelenskyy meets team from Raytheon, US company that builds Patriots, and says Ukraine is now negotiating joint interceptor production
Ukraine's president has taken the question of Patriot production to the company that builds the missile. Volodymyr Zelenskyy met a team from the American defense company Raytheon and said Ukraine is negotiating joint production of interceptors for the Patriot air defense systems, one of the country's key air defenses, he announced.
At the Farnborough Airshow this week, senior executives from Raytheon parent RTX and from Lockheed Martin described talks on Ukrainian Patriot production as "early days" and said they were awaiting US government guidance on licensing.
Zelenskyy's meeting, led by Raytheon Vice President Joseph Deantona, is the Ukrainian side pushing that process forward directly with the company rather than waiting on it.
Zelenskyy ties talks back to Ankara
Raytheon is a powerful defense company whose equipment Ukraine has long used to protect people from Russian attacks, Zelenskyy said at the meeting, thanking the team for its readiness to take the partnership to a new level, specifically on joint production of Patriot interceptors.
The sides also discussed other areas of cooperation, including non-offensive military equipment, and agreed that Ukrainian teams at the government level and in the private sector should stay in contact with Raytheon to work out the details of the partnership.
Interceptor shortage is reason for urgency
The Patriot interceptor is the weapon Ukraine most needs and can least produce, which is what makes any production deal so consequential and its timeline so pressing. Ukraine's interception rate against ballistic missiles was roughly 40% in June, against 89% for air threats overall, and only Patriots reliably engage the ballistic and hypersonic missiles in Russia's massed strikes.
The gap between negotiation and missile is the catch. Independent estimates put the first Ukrainian-built interceptors well over a year away, and the deepest bottleneck is a Boeing guidance component made in only two places on Earth.
For the near term, Zelenskyy has been clear that the missiles that matter come from existing American stocks.
He told NATO's United States envoy this week that increased interceptor deliveries through the PURL mechanism are "the key priority, because Russia's massed strikes do not stop." The Raytheon talks are about the year after this one, while the PURL deliveries are about tonight.
