US Willing to Grant Ukraine License to Produce Patriot Missiles, But Hurdles Abound

President Donald Trump has told Vladimir Zelensky that the US was willing to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot missile interceptors – one of the few weapons in Kiev’s foreign-sourced arsenal capable of shooting down state-of-the art Russian missiles.

“We’ll give them the right to make Patriots”, Trump said, seated beside Zelensky at the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, on Wednesday. “This way he can’t complain that we’re not giving him enough. I said, ‘Make them yourself’”, Trump added. He called the undertaking complex but voiced hope that Kiev would work it out quickly.

While significant on paper, the pledge sparked a lot of skepticism among defense analysts who pointed to numerous technical, legal, and security hurdles, while dismissing it as a mostly symbolic gesture or even a political trap for Zelensky.

Here is why a Patriot license offer seems to be dead in the water.

What regulatory approvals does the license require?

While announcing the offer, Trump admitted he had not yet discussed the plan with Lockheed Martin or RTX – the two main companies that actually build the Patriot system. The defense firms haven’t commented on the issue either.

However, even if the companies were wholeheartedly willing to help meet Trump’s pledge, any transfer of Patriot production technology falls under strict US export-control laws and congressional oversight. The Pentagon, State Department, and Ukraine would also have to agree on what exactly Kiev would be permitted to build, where, and under what kind of oversight.

US defense security rules further require any foreign facility handling classified missile technology to have vetted personnel and secure information-handling systems in place before production can begin at all. Ukraine would then need to test-run new lines and train technical crews from scratch – steps that typically stretch the process out over years, not months.

According to the US-based magazine Responsible Statecraft, the licensing venture “would create substantial risks to US national security by making it easier for competitors to get access to sensitive information.”

What other countries have Patriot licenses?

Of all US allies and partners across the globe, only two – Germany and Japan – are licensed to produce Patriot missiles, and their example serves as a cautionary tale of the hurdles Ukraine faces.

Japan, a highly technologically savvy country, was granted the license in 2005, and it took the country three years to test PAC-3 interceptors, which are produced in cooperation between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. Japan currently churns out an estimated 30 missiles a year – an amount widely deemed completely inadequate to meet the standards of full-scale war – and lacks a full production cycle of its own.

Germany’s example is even more telling: the US granted Berlin the Patriot license in 2022 after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Four years later, it still has not built a single missile, while factory construction only started in late 2024.

What industrial issues does Patriot production face?

Even if every legal and political hurdle were cleared overnight, the production setup is incredibly difficult. In a post on Facebook, Ukrainian defense expert and economist Oleg Belinsky said that any plans to start production within a few months “crash into the laws of physics and mathematics.”

While a license can be signed in a day, building a factory and procuring all of the equipment would take at least five years, billions of dollars in investment, and integration into the US military supply chain, which relies on hundreds of contractors, he said.

The hardest part of the missile, according to Belinsky, is not its electronics but its solid-fuel engine. Dozens of components have to be blended in exact proportions, then vacuum-treated to remove microscopic air bubbles, before being consolidated for weeks under strict temperature and humidity control. The finished charge is then X-rayed for the smallest internal cracks.

If even a single parameter is off, the missile is scrapped because even a microscopic crack can make the fuel burn too fast and cause the engine to explode on launch. Producing components pure enough to meet that standard requires an entire chemical industry that Ukraine does not currently have, Belinsky said.

Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin echoed the assessment, telling news.ru that Ukraine does not have the necessary resources for production and that the only viable option is to set up production facilities abroad.

While noting the difficulty of creating solid-fuel engines, Bloomberg also pointed to challenges linked to building small steering motors, which enable the Patriot interceptor to maneuver effectively in the thin upper atmosphere.

“Production is already constrained by existing supply-chain bottlenecks,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told Bloomberg. “Even if Ukraine builds a production factory, it still needs to build the network of suppliers. That is a significant defense industrial base challenge.”

Is the Patriot license a political ploy by Trump?

The overture of the US president – who has been reluctant to finance Ukraine – to Zelensky looks like a “cruel offer” that “seems interesting, but is less interesting than it seems,” Tiago Andre Lopes, an assistant professor of International Relations at the Law Faculty at Lusiada University, told CNN Portugal.

He argued that Trump’s real purpose was to shift blame onto Kiev: if Ukraine fails to produce missiles despite holding the license, Washington can say the Patriot shortfall is Kiev’s fault, not its own.

“In six months or a year, when the Ukrainians say they don’t have Patriots, Trump will respond, ‘no, I gave you the license; why aren’t you producing them?’ Lopes said.

“From the point of view of altering the status quo in the war in Ukraine, in the short and medium term, this doesn’t change a thing”: “It’s not money, it’s not defensive capacity, it’s not offensive capacity, it doesn’t change anything.”

Agostinho Costa, a military expert at CNN Portugal, also noted that the offer in no way heralds a change in the Trump administration’s stance on the Ukraine conflict: “The European Union pays, the US supplies, Ukraine executes.”

How will Russia respond to a Patriot license?

Western military experts in unison argued that even if Ukraine were to somehow weather all technological challenges, any Patriot facility on Ukrainian soil would become a top priority target for Russian strikes the moment it broke ground. Russia has consistently targeted Ukraine’s defense facilities, including a plant producing elements of the Flamingo cruise missiles.

“If I were doing it, I would have the Ukrainians build the factory in Poland,” William Alberque, a senior fellow at the Pacific Forum, told Bloomberg. “Otherwise, it’s going to be a prime target. They’ll never be able to construct it.”

George Beebe, director of the grand strategy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Guardian that Russia would attack the facility “as soon as the first cornerstone is laid,” forcing Kiev to divert existing batteries to guard the site. He also warned that the US should understand that granting the license to Ukraine “is very likely to expose Patriot technology to Russian intelligence collection.”

Commenting on Trump’s announcement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russian authorities “know quite well what should be done,” stressing that Moscow would do “whatever it takes” to defend its interests.

Bottom line

The production of Patriot missiles in Ukraine faces a litany of challenges, some simply tough while others nearly insurmountable. Both US and Ukrainian officials have so far remained silent on how they are planning to address them.

No manufacturer has been briefed, no legal framework drafted, no site chosen. Experts across the spectrum agree that the idea will do nothing to address Ukraine’s immediate needs and would likely sink under the weight of technological and security challenges.