US holding up air defense missiles for Ukraine for nearly a month, Zelensky says
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Ukraine has been waiting nearly a month for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to approve missiles for its Patriot and NASAMS air defense systems, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Oct. 26.
The delay, first reported by the Kyiv Independent, affects missiles that Ukraine's allies have already paid for. Ukraine relies on Patriot systems to intercept Russian ballistic missiles, which are particularly difficult to stop, making timely deliveries critical to the country's air defenses.
"I instructed our team to raise this with the American side once again," Zelensky said.
Ukraine obtains Patriot interceptors through several channels, including NATO's Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a mechanism through which Kyiv's allies fund weapons purchases from the United States, a senior Ukrainian military official said.
Zelensky has said the U.S. delivers only 12 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine each month.
A senior Ukrainian official previously told the Kyiv Independent that the batch awaiting Hegseth's approval was "significant."
Ukraine has also recently experienced repeated disruptions to its early-warning systems for incoming Russian ballistic missiles, which rely on U.S. intelligence. American officials have attributed the outages, which have occurred several times in the past, to "bad weather conditions."
Kyiv has also had problems with military-grade Starlink service, Starshield, which have severely hampered Ukrainian drone operations, including the use of interceptor drones to counter Russian jet-powered attack drones.
Ukrainian officials have described the delays and disruptions as another example of political pressure from Washington that could put civilian lives at risk.
