Trump grants Kyiv Patriots licences: What’s next in the Russia-Ukraine war?
Kyiv will rush to produce the systems domestically as Russia struggles to defend itself against some Ukrainian attacks. Kyiv, Ukraine – Patriot missile interceptors are
Kyiv will rush to produce the systems domestically as Russia struggles to defend itself against some Ukrainian attacks. Kyiv, Ukraine – Patriot missile interceptors are the most coveted Western-made weapon Ukraine needs – right now and every night when Russia attacks. Frequent Russian strikes depleted Ukraine’s stock of the pricey United States-made interceptors – and US President Donald Trump has now offered hope, giving Kyiv a licence to make them. “A little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it, it’s very complex actually. But it’s – you’ll figure out the complexity quickly,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a NATO summit in Turkiye on Wednesday. “This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough.” Trump has not specified when the production might start – and said that Washington would hold on to its own stash. Ukraine said it will attempt to master domestic production as soon as possible. In the short-term perspective, Ukraine “perhaps, gets nothing,” according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University. However, “access to US technologies can significantly speed up or develop Ukraine’s domestic program of ballistic and counter-ballistic missiles,” he told Al Jazeera. Ukraine may opt to produce cheaper and simpler missiles, and it may take less than a year, he said. “However, we can’t rule out that such a programme already exists and has only been made public,” he said. Ukraine seeks to produce missiles that are only part of the Patriot surface-to-air systems that also consist of missile launchers, a radar and a control van. The van lets the system move around to avoid detection and consequent strikes. But it is other “little birdies” that make the difference on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war. A Ukrainian spy drone recently froze 80 metres above a forest patch in the no-man’s land in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The drone’s operator, who was sitting in a bunker dozens of kilometres west of the patch, saw a hole in the ground where a Russian soldier clad in grey-green camouflage was hiding.
The soldier sneaked there as part of Moscow’s new tactic of dispatching two or three “infiltrators” to bypass porous Ukrainian positions – because larger groups are easier to detect and destroy. The drone’s operator, whose video stream Al Jazeera observed in real time from his commander’s laptop, clicked and clacked to call for help. In less than a minute, an explosives-laden kamikaze drone flew right into the hole. The spy drone’s operator yelled a triumphant expletive – and flew his drone farther east. “I receive streams from 20, 30 drones at once,” the unit’s commander told Al Jazeera, withholding his and his unit’s name and exact location in accordance with wartime protocol. The scene is but an episode in the daily life and death of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, but it puts an end to the millennia-old concept of a “front line,” where soldiers actually see – and kill – each other. ‘Network-centric warfare’ When the war began in 2022, it was two e Soviet armies fighting each other using World War II stratagems and relying on tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery that now seem hopelessly extinct. Instead, “things are moving towards further development of the conception of network-centric warfare,” Pavel Luzin, a military analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera. He referred to real-time connection between commanders, servicemen and their weaponry that helps achieve faster command speed and combat advantage. And as a conscription and desertion crisis widens, Ukraine’s military increasingly relies on fast technological solutions such as ground robots that blow up enemy bunkers, fire machineguns, deliver food and ammunition, and rescue wounded soldiers. “If we didn’t have a shortage of soldiers, the generals would still be sending soldiers to the front line,” Ihor Chaikivsky, head of the Robotic Complexes company that produces cart-like ground robots in the western city of Ternopil, told Al Jazeera. “We didn’t want to go to the front line, didn’t want to die in the trenches, so we started using ground robots.” While some solutions may seem low-tech, others use artificial intelligence with lethal precision.
The BriefWire