Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday said US President Donald Trump told him he would allow Ukraine to produce advanced Patriot air defence missiles, after a series of reversals on the issue.
“At our last meeting, President Trump emphasised to me that yes, I have made a final decision. “It’s strange: on the one hand, I’ve got used to it, but on the other, people are constantly dying. It needs five percent of the United States’ Patriot interceptor missiles to get through the winter and 10 percent to destroy all of Russia’s ballistic projectiles, Zelensky said last month. The 23-year-old IT specialist said he was woken up by an explosion but only realised the strike had hit his own building when he checked the news.
Ukraine will receive licences for the production of Patriot missiles,” Zelensky said in a voice note to journalists. In July, Trump said it would be “pretty cool” to grant Ukraine the licences, before backtracking, saying the United States should be “very careful” before granting Ukraine authorisation. “My jaw dropped a bit,” he said. In the southern region of Odesa, another person was killed in a repeated strike on a postal facility, authorities said.
