After decades of relying on the U.S.-made Patriot interceptor system and its hit-to-kill PAC-3 munition as the most proven air defense against ballistic missiles, three new tracks are now leveraging international cooperation and a dire global need to develop and manufacture cheaper interceptor platforms.

Some officials, meanwhile, are hoping the sense of urgency leads to the fielding of the first new prototypes by the end of 2026 — years faster than today’s Patriots can be made.

It’s an ambitious ask.

The missile defense world has long described the mechanics behind anti-ballistic defense as akin to hitting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet, multiplied in difficulty by the number of simultaneous air threats coming in — a stark reminder of the mass air raids seen today in Iran and Ukraine that stretch air defenses to the breaking point.

Today’s anti-ballistic momentum began with U.S. President Donald Trump’s seemingly off-the-cuff comment at the NATO summit in Ankara earlier this month, when he pledged to grant Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies that make the system’s components, primarily Lockheed Martin, had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Five days later, Ukraine and nine European countries launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new anti-ballistic system centered on a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed Martin unveiled a cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile of its own. And on Wednesday, the company announced the Pentagon had awarded it another $53.86 billion for PAC-3 production, bringing its multiyear deal up to $58.62 billion and aiming to triple production capacity by the end of 2030.

The new anti-ballistics arms race has manifested largely as a result of the munitions shortage created by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, during which American forces have fired at least 1,060 to 1,430 Patriots at roughly $3.9 million apiece, draining an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot inventory, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The diminished stockpile is compounded by the ongoing war in Ukraine, where ballistic missiles are the only threat Kyiv still needs help taking down and the one munition it has completely run out of.

With three new anti-ballistic tracks opened in July alone, NATO and its allies are aiming to shore up air defenses as quickly as possible.

Here is where the primary Patriot interceptor stands, and how the three new alternative pathways in the arms race stack up.

The standard: The Patriot interceptor

The Patriot, the U.S.-made gold standard of ground-based air defense, pairs a radar, a command post and launchers with two families of interceptor missiles, each fielded in several variants.

Lockheed Martin builds the PAC-3 MSE, the hit-to-kill round that rams ballistic missiles out of the sky, while Raytheon, which also makes the Patriot’s radars and ground systems, builds the older PAC-2 GEM-T, a round that explodes near its target and works best against aircraft and cruise missiles.

The MSE is the only Western munition that has reliably killed Russian ballistic missiles — from Iskanders to modified S-300s — in Ukrainian service. It has even downed the air-launched Kinzhal, which flies at hypersonic speeds.

That record is why the Pentagon on Wednesday awarded Lockheed a multiyear deal now worth up to $58.62 billion to triple production capacity by the end of 2030. Today, each round costs roughly $3.9 million.

“This is a once-in-a-generation moment, and we are moving with wartime urgency to deliver the Arsenal of Freedom,” Lockheed chairman and CEO Jim Taiclet said in a statement.

The grant: Ukrainian PAC-3s under US license

Trump’s pledge in Turkey would make Ukraine only the second country outside the U.S. licensed to build Patriot missiles, after Japan, which has produced them under license for decades.

Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are only now standing up a joint production line. Berlin is negotiating a license of its own and Germany’s existing GEM-T work runs through a joint venture with Raytheon rather than a national license, according to The Associated Press.

The license under discussion for Kyiv would likely cover the missiles — rather than complete batteries — and could mean final assembly from imported component kits instead of production from scratch, the AP reported.

Poland has offered to host the joint production on its territory for safety and security reasons, according to Polish news agency PAP.

“It is about securing this production, so that this production takes place in a safe location,” Polish Deputy Defense Minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said in Washington on July 23.

Zelenskyy said he met with Lockheed Martin representatives while visiting the U.S. for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral on July 28, posting on Telegram that “Our teams are already working on specific solutions to move to joint production as soon as possible.”

The cost of the licensed PAC-3, meanwhile, would stay the same at close $4 million per round.

Yehor Chernev, deputy chairman of the Rada’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, estimates Ukraine needs at least 18 to 24 months to launch a first pilot production line, “followed by more time to complete the first weapons,” per The Associated Press.

Zelenskyy is pushing for even faster joint production.

“We expect that by the end of 2026, our Ukrainian team will have the technical capability to produce U.S. missiles,” he said on July 15.

The analogue: Freyja

Freyja is a full Patriot-style anti-ballistic system that includes an interceptor, launcher, radar and command-and-control network.

The system, designed by Kyiv startup Fire Point, is built around its FP-7.X interceptor missile and various capabilities supplied by European partners.

Zelenskyy called Freyja “an analogue of Patriot, but a system for more mass production and a cheaper system.”

His comments came as he formally launched the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition in Paris on July 13 alongside nine other countries, including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The FP-7.X flew for the first time in early June and is built to kill ballistic targets at roughly 15 miles up using a high-explosive fragmentation warhead rather than the PAC-3’s hit-to-kill collision — which may come in later versions — at a target price of approximately $700,000 per interceptor, or roughly one-fifth the price of a PAC-3.

The company says it will build three interceptors a day starting in August. Zelenskyy wants the system up and running within 12 months, and the coalition is targeting its first real ballistic intercept for the end of 2027.

“We have an ambitious goal: to have an MVP ready by the first half of next year,” Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Reuters on July 27. “That is a prototype that can already demonstrate its first practical results.”

The Lockheed cost-cutter: PAC-3 ACE

Lockheed unveiled the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, or ACE, at the Farnborough International Airshow on July 20.

Built on the PAC-3’s fire-control system and fully linked to the Patriot and the Integrated Battle Command System that allied air defenders already run, it is designed to counter airbreathing threats — meaning weapons that rely on oxygen for propulsion — along with cruise missiles and close- and short-range ballistic missiles, a tier below the high-end targets the MSE was built to counter.

“American and allied warfighters need a solution that is battle-tested and budget-smart, and PAC-3 ACE delivers exactly that by building on the unrivaled performance of the PAC-3 MSE,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in the announcement.

Lockheed says it will develop and produce the round jointly with American and European industry partners.

International manufacturing is also under consideration, with the munition’s first flight expected in early 2028.

The company advertises ACE at less than half the price of an MSE, or roughly $2 million a round, without disclosing an exact figure.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed to the kill at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing while being asked about a three-year halt in U.S. air-defense funding.

“I want to highlight the incredible work the Ukraine industrial base is doing as they scale their own capabilities,” Caine said.

“Recently we had the first air-to-air kill where a Ukrainian F-16 shot down a Russian fighter, so I think their ability to scale their layered defense has come a long way over the last couple of years.”

Although Caine did not specify which type of Russian aircraft was taken out, Ukraine’s Air Force announced earlier this month that it had shot down a Russian Su-35 on the eastern front.

Until now, Ukraine has primarily used its F‑16s to defensively knock down incoming drones and cruise missiles — not offensively hunting enemy aircraft. The air-to-air kill is the latest example of Kyiv’s rapidly expanded air defense network forged after persevering through years of full-scale war, Caine said.

Russia’s defense ministry has not acknowledged the loss. Pro-Russian military bloggers on Telegram confirmed a Su-35 went down and said the pilot survived and ejected safely, while other Russian channels claimed a Patriot battery delivered the fatal shot.

Ukraine’s F-16s have shot down 2,200 of roughly 3,000 Russian drones and missiles it has intercepted, air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat told Dutch broadcaster NOS earlier this month.

The kills are in spite of the technical advantages favoring Russia’s Su-35 over Ukraine’s F-16s.

Most of it’s F‑16s were given to Kyiv by the Netherlands and Denmark, who sent rebuilt 1970s‑ and 1980s‑era F‑16A and B airframes — closer to the F‑16s that the U.S. Air Force flew in the early 2000s than to today’s newer models, according to a Sandboxx analysis.

The Su‑35S is one of the most modern fighters Moscow flies and usually comes out as the winner in a long‑range fight, experts say.

Its Irbis‑E radar can detect a fighter‑sized target at up to 250 miles (400 km) in a narrow search mode, according to its Russian manufacturer, far beyond the range of the 1990s‑era AN/APG‑66(V)2 radar on Ukraine’s F‑16s.

The Su‑35 also has the advantage of carrying the longer‑reaching R‑77M missile, which Moscow credits with a range of roughly 120 miles (190 km), against the 75 to 100 miles of the AIM‑120C‑8 AMRAAMs Ukraine is known to field, according to The War Zone.

Allies have taken notice of Kyiv’s recent battlefield successes, signing billions in arms contracts with Kyiv since the war with Iran drove up demand for the latest defense tech from Europe and the Middle East.

Ukraine’s homegrown interceptor‑drone industry has scaled rapidly in the past year, with some producers now capable of turning out over 100,000 drones per month, officials say.

Washington is also inching toward a multibillion dollar weapons‑production deal with Kyiv.

The Ukrainian armed forces are “the strongest, most powerful armed forces in all of Europe,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May, months before the CIA director confirmed last week that Russian recruits last just 20 to 30 minutes after arriving on the battlefield thanks to Ukraine’s fierce drone fighting tactics.

The assessment comes as Ukraine’s battlefield technology has stalled Russia’s advance along the front and drawn foreign partners ready to spend billions of dollars in deals with its defense industry.

European and Ukrainian officials have said for months that Russian casualty rates have climbed to record levels, with Ukraine’s top general telling NATO allies in May that Russia loses at least 1,000 soldiers a day.

“Our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said at the Defense and Innovation Summit in Pennsylvania. “The average life expectancy of a Russian recruit right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.”

“That’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines,” he added.

Ratcliffe’s confirmation shows how decisively emerging technology can shape a war — and why the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind.

The Russia-to-Ukraine casualty ratio reached nearly 8-to-1 in the first half of 2026, up from roughly 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 for most of the war, as AI-powered drones expanded across the front, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

More than 2 million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, with Russia bearing 1.4 million of those casualties, the CSIS researchers found, including as many as 450,000 dead — the highest battlefield death toll suffered by any major power since World War II.

“The takeaway is that the mastery of these emerging technologies is every bit as important as military strength,” Ratcliffe said during the summit. “That’s why an inferior force, four and a half years later, has held off the superior force of Russia.”

Ratcliffe said the U.S. needs to take the lessons learned on the battlefield in Ukraine seriously.

“The pace of their advance has stopped as Ukraine’s mastery of emerging technologies and, in this case, drone warfare, asymmetric warfare, is such a great equalizer, and shows why we have to be leading on this in all respects for us to maintain our place in the global marketplace,” he said.

His remarks came as Washington and its European allies race to fund Ukraine’s drone programs and lock in access to the technology behind them.

The day before, the European Union and Ukraine signed a drone-production deal in Kyiv worth over $6 billion, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that progress had been made on a package of multibillion dollar deals with the U.S.

He first said a coalition of allies would work together to build the complicated weapon at last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, where U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to let Ukraine build its own Patriot interceptors after recognizing that, in Zelenskyy’s words, Ukraine is “a country that is ready to do this.”

The initiative was launched as a result of a global shortage of anti-ballistic interceptors, as the war in Iran and nearby countries carries on into its fifth month and allied partners across the world push to stock up on defensive weapons.

Nine European countries joined Ukraine as founding members in Paris: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

“We believe that the protection of Europe requires a global solution of integrated missile defence architecture to deter and defeat future missile threats — developed through collective effort, technological openness, and trusted industrial cooperation,” officials wrote in the joint statement formalizing the new coalition.

Although the United States has increased Patriot output and Europe has expanded production of the surface-to-air missile systems SAMP/T, IRIS-T and NASAMS, the shortfall between demand and supply is still wide.

“By bringing together our defence industrial base, our research, and our operational experience, we aim to build a shared antiballistic missile capacity for Europe and support relevant contributory activities. We do this not against any people, but in defence of our own,” the signatories said.

For Ukraine, gaining antiballistic capabilities would enable better protection of its cities and frontlines, both which have increasingly been targeted by Russian ballistic missiles that cannot be taken out by air defenses — and free them from completely depending on allies for this type of support.

For Europe, the coalition offers a fast-tracked path to resolving weapons shortages, strengthening their own defenses at a discount and benefiting from the battlefield expertise Ukraine has gained over years of full-scale war.

The group’s current priorities are to “establish common operational requirements, joint technical working groups, clear governance mechanisms, and a roadmap towards the Coalition’s first operational capabilities,” the announcement said.

In statements about the new coalition posted on social media on Monday, the president explained why Kyiv and Europe need their own anti-ballistic system.

“The threat of ballistic missiles in the world is only going to increase. This is one of the main consequences of the wars in Russia and Iran,” Zelenskyy said. “Therefore, FREYJA must become a reality.”

Ukraine will head the project, supplying the interceptor itself, with partners providing the radar, tracking and command-and-control systems it lacks, Zelenskyy said last week.

“Europe needs more protection against ballistic threats. Together, we can create such a system,” he said. “It is important to politically confirm that FREYJA is our joint project, serving the interests of all of Europe.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa also attended Monday’s meeting in Paris, in addition to representatives from several European defense companies, including: Destinus, Diehl Defence, Eurosam, Fire Point, HENSOLDT, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, Leonardo, MBDA, Saab, Safran, Thales and Weibel Scientific.

“Everyone present here is a vital part of what we need to create this system,” the Ukrainian president said. “I am grateful to the companies for their willingness to work together.”

Although the partnership’s nuts and bolts are still in the works, each country in the coalition will retain a certain degree of autonomy, Zelenskyy said.

“Europeans themselves will be able to decide how many systems Europe needs and where they should be located. This would create a strategically new situation,” he said. “Each European system would add to the overall strength and provide different parts of Europe with a strategic foundation for defense.”

Like Patriot interceptors, Freyja is an entire system that will rely on allies for production support, centering on Fire Point’s FP-7.X interceptor, designed to hit a ballistic target at roughly 15 miles altitude.

But while Patriots take 24 months to build, Zelenskyy said he wants Freyja flying much sooner.

“Each of us holds a crucial piece of the puzzle: we in Ukraine have the missiles, but these are only parts of the system,” he said. “Together, we can create this comprehensive system – FREYJA – within the next twelve months.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, detailing the deal on Thursday after he and Trump met at the NATO summit in Turkey earlier in the week, said the two have resolved it “as leaders” and that Ukraine has been “recognized by America as a country that is ready” to build the system.

“Thank you for the positive decision regarding the license for the production of Patriots,” Zelenskyy said, noting that Trump “repeatedly emphasized that today only two or three countries in the world can produce Patriots, because others are not technologically ready.”

Zelenskyy has pressed Washington for the interceptors for years, as Russia has fired ever more ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities. Trump’s offer to let Kyiv produce Patriots could hand it an edge both on the battlefield and in its standing with allies and foes alike, but only on a timeline that will take years and cost billions of dollars.

“Our groups, our diplomats, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense need to agree on all the other technical matters,” Zelenskyy told journalists on Thursday. “The sooner we agree, the sooner we will be able to produce Patriots.”

The promise moves Ukraine from a war it entered reliant on Western arms toward building the most sought after air defense weapon of the conflict itself, a milestone for Kyiv and a measure of how far Washington has shifted. It also moves Kyiv a step closer to defending itself without leaning on allies who have rationed what they send.

So far, the nuts and bolts of the deal remain largely undecided from both government officials and industry leaders — and unsigned. The manufacturer has also not been entirely brief.

“We haven’t informed the company of that yet,” Trump said of Lockheed Martin, which builds the interceptor, while announcing the agreement.

The Patriot’s PAC-3 interceptor destroys its target on impact, a “hit-to-kill” design, and is one of the only weapons able to stop a ballistic missile, making it among the most closely guarded technology the United States exports.

A Patriot interceptor brings together an entire ecosystem of weapons: a radar, a command post, along with the launchers and the interceptors themselves. Ukraine is aiming for permission to manufacture the PAC-3 MSE, the newest and the hardest to build.

Japan is the only other country that builds Patriots under a U.S. license today. Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are jointly standing up a European production line, and Berlin is separately negotiating its own license.

Washington licenses it sparingly because of fears the tech could end up in enemy hands. That caution has only deepened now.

The U.S. fired between 1,060 and 1,430 Patriots in this year’s war with Iran at roughly $3.9 million apiece, many more than the hundreds Ukraine received from all of its Western allies over a span of four years.

Each interceptor takes 24 months to build and 30 for its solid rocket motor, and a single Boeing plant in Huntsville, Alabama, makes the seeker for each one, a Foreign Policy Research Institute analysis found.

That single plant turned out between 650 and 700 seekers last year, a bottleneck that paces the whole line.

Although the Pentagon signed a separate deal in April to triple the key part’s production, even the interceptors ordered under an accelerated $4.8 billion contract this year are not expected for delivery until 2030.

“Fewer such missiles are produced worldwide each month than the enemy fires at Ukraine in that same period,” Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.

Lockheed Martin delivered 620 of its top PAC-3s last year. A January framework with the Pentagon aims to lift that to 2,000 a year by 2030, according to a Foreign Policy Research Institute analysis.

And Ukraine has no anti-ballistic system of its own — yet.

Zelenskyy this week announced Ukraine is pouring resources into a homegrown version, a cheaper, mass-produced answer to the Patriot he calls FREYA, built around a Ukrainian-made missile and European radars, launchers and command systems.

He plans to present it to partners in France in the coming days, he said Thursday.

Russia’s ballistic missiles are its deadliest weapon against Ukrainian cities. A mass attack overnight on Sunday killed at least 22 people in Kyiv, with all of Russia’s 29 ballistic missiles dodging air defenses, Ukraine’s air force said.

More than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the U.N. human rights office has verified.

Zelenskyy has called those strikes Russia’s “only advantage” left and named Patriot production his “priority number one.”

Ukraine is “working in different directions” at once, he said, pursuing the American license, European financing and French systems side by side.

The French-Italian SAMP/T, a costly system Zelenskyy called an “analogue of Patriot,” is already arriving under agreements he struck with French President Emmanuel Macron. It is the only other weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal built specifically to stop a ballistic missile.

“Production is very small, queues are very long, involving different countries,” Zelenskyy said of the Patriot and the French systems.

The president acknowledged that none of these solutions will end Russia’s onslaught of Ukrainian cities overnight, making the development of domestic defense systems Kyiv’s top priority.

“Then we will close Ukraine’s sky with our own capabilities,” he said.

The push follows this week’s NATO summit in Ankara, where allies pledged €70 billion ($80 billion) in military aid for Ukraine this year.

U.S. President Donald Trump also pledged to allow Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, a long-awaited goal of Kyiv. “We’ll give them the right to make Patriots,” he said.

“This is a European model,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. “FREYA is our Ukrainian anti-ballistic system…an analogue in terms of intercepting ballistic targets, an analogue of Patriot, but a system for more mass production and a cheaper system.”

Long-range missile and drone strikes caused 45% of Ukraine’s civilian casualties in May, the worst monthly toll since April 2022, according to a U.N. report.

Ballistic missiles remain the one threat Ukraine still can’t intercept with a system it built itself. Freya could change that, potentially shifting Kyiv’s position on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.

Freya centers on the FP-7.X interceptor, produced by the Ukrainian company Fire Point, and is designed to hit a ballistic target at roughly 15 miles altitude.

Like Patriot interceptors, Freya is an entire system and will rely on allies for production support.

“A system needs not only a missile and a launcher. It needs radars, command and control, and many different elements,” he said.

“To create our anti-ballistic system very quickly, we need European partners who have production of those things that Ukraine does not yet have for its own anti-ballistic system.”

Fire Point has signed a memorandum with Germany’s Hensoldt for radar technology and is in talks with France’s Thales, Italy’s Leonardo and Norway’s Kongsberg to supply tracking and command-and-control systems.

Zelenskyy said the Freya coalition, which he described as comprising roughly eight partner nations, will speed up the production process and make a faster timeline possible.

“We can do it ourselves, but years will pass,” he said.

Fire Point is targeting a per-shot cost near $700,000, versus roughly $3.8 million for a Patriot PAC-3.

The missile was flight-tested in early June, the company said, and is aiming to mass-produce three a day starting in August and intercept its first ballistic missile by the end of 2027.

The upcoming meeting in France may yield the next updates as Zelenskyy said the current plan depends on partner nations, their manufacturers and their production capacity signing on.

“God willing, the partners will support it, and God willing, our manufacturers will succeed with all of this,” he said.

The confirmation came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara pledged the U.S. would give Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, a long-sought goal for Kyiv as a global shortage of the missiles and intensifying Russian strikes leave its cities exposed.

Zelenskyy stopped short of tying the license to the multibillion-dollar drone deal, presenting the two as separate tracks working towards the same general goals.

“There are some documents that have already been signed so that the American side can receive from Ukraine various types of systems in which the United States is interested for testing,” Zelenskyy said in response to a question by Military Times.

“And they are receiving these from us.”

Kyiv pitched the multibillion-dollar drone partnership to Washington more than a year ago and has waited for a sign-off that never came, with U.S. officials publicly cool on it as recently as last month.

Zelenskyy’s account that the testing is underway and going well is the first real movement on the deal in months.

He named “aerial drones, maritime drones and other technological items” as the systems already changing hands.

“That testing is now underway, and that we are receiving very positive feedback, is a fact,” he said. “After this, we will move to another, next stage, to the drone deal.”

The full drone deal, a partnership Zelenskyy has valued at $35 billion to $50 billion, would reportedly set up a 50-50 production venture with the U.S. drawing on up to 200 Ukrainian companies.

But that deal remains unsigned, held up for months awaiting Trump’s approval.

Zelenskyy pointed to Ukraine’s wartime standing, calling its defense industry “at NATO level, and already one of the best” and saying Kyiv is “ready to share our own development and technologies.”

Days before the summit, the cost of the shortage was written in the rubble of Kyiv after Russia fired 68 missiles and 351 drones at Ukraine overnight, according to Ukrainian Air Force officials.

The shortage that makes a Ukrainian Patriot line so appealing sharpened this spring, when the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran burned through American interceptor stocks.

Gulf defenses fired as many as 1,430 Patriot interceptors in 39 days, a CSIS analysis found, draining inventories Ukraine had counted on.

By late April, Ukrainian crews were rationing mid-attack, firing one interceptor at incoming ballistics instead of the standard two to four to stretch what remained.

Air Force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said the Patriot force was down to a “starvation ration,” according to Euromaidan.

Even while minimizing the use of interceptors, Ukrainian air defenses downed roughly 92% of the Shaheds Russia launched in May, according to the Air Force, and cheap interceptor drones now do more of that work.

Ukraine built 100,000 of those drones in 2025 and doubled the pace in the first four months of 2026.

By the time Zelenskyy proposed a formal “Drone Deal Initiative” at NATO’s Ankara summit on July 7, several countries had already signed bilateral drone agreements with Kyiv.

He also arrived with a NATO intelligence assessment endorsed by all 32 members that Russia could invade a member state by 2029.

Ukraine’s mission chief to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, told allies in Brussels on July 2 that Ukraine helps guide the alliance’s only joint center, red-teams its war games and has a record number of members backing its membership.

She cast Ukraine not as an aid recipient, but as the only NATO partner actually implementing the alliance’s Strategic Concept and backed by drone-export permits, testing deals and combat-proven systems.

The Patriot license and the drone testing deal are the first fruits of a budding relationship between equals, officials hope.

“Everyone respects our army, everyone respects the country, everyone respects our technology companies,” Zelensky noted. “We are ready to share our own development and technologies.”

Word broke June 23 that the four-star general had submitted his retirement papers after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth personally requested that he resign, according to multiple reports. The Army has yet to provide a definitive reason for the change.

Donahue’s predecessor, Gen. Darryl Williams, held the post for nearly two and a half years. Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, Donahue’s deputy, took over in an acting capacity Thursday after a farewell ceremony at the Clay Kaserne headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Within days of the news, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, held a phone call with Donahue and published a farewell on his personal social media accounts, thanking the outgoing official for creating a partnership that he said delivered long-range systems, strengthened Ukraine’s air defenses and saved thousands of Ukrainian lives.

The two military leaders have worked together since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, when Syrskyi, then chief of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, directed the defense of Kyiv and Donahue led the 82nd Airborne Division into southeastern Poland. Their partnership has only strengthened over the years, Syrskyi said.

“In the most challenging moments of our war for freedom and independence, Chris Donahue has proven himself not only as a military leader but also as a man of his word and honor,” Syrskyi wrote on Telegram.

“Ukrainian warriors will always hold General Donahue in the highest esteem.”

The farewell, meanwhile, lands at a fraught moment in U.S.-Ukraine relations. The Trump administration has questioned the value of Kyiv’s fight in the past, even as the U.S. military incorporates more Ukrainian battlefield know-how amid its war with Iran.

Now, the American general who built the Army’s support machinery for Ukraine is out, and Syrskyi’s public tribute shows Kyiv knows what it stands to lose.

According to two U.S. officials cited by CBS News, Donahue “had earned the ire” of Hegseth, and the two men met in person only once, in February 2025.

Asked about accusations that Hegseth forced the general out over a personal grudge, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell provided no explanation.

“General officers and flag officers serve at the pleasure of the president and the secretary of war,” Parnell told the Daily Beast on Sunday. “They always have and always will.”

The departure extends a shake-up that has removed or replaced at least a dozen senior military leaders since Hegseth took office, with many of the moves made without public explanation.

U.S. President Donald Trump praised Donahue in January, when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade visited the general’s Wiesbaden headquarters and put Donahue on the phone with the president as his soldiers gathered around, according to Stars and Stripes.

“You’re doing a fantastic job,” Trump said. “Your reputation is great.”

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine is among those seeking a presidential waiver so Donahue can retire at four stars, a rank he has held for fewer than the three years federal law requires to retire at that grade, two sources told CBS News.

The Wiesbaden headquarters itself is officially being downgraded to a three-star command, part of Hegseth’s push to cut the number of four-star billets, Stars and Stripes reported. U.S. Air Forces in Europe lost its fourth star in a similar move last year.

Donahue has said nothing publicly about the circumstances of his exit, and the subject went unmentioned at Thursday’s ceremony. He thanked his troops in his farewell remarks, instead.

“I love this team — it has been the honor of a lifetime to be a part of it. I’m proud of what we built and I have absolute confidence in what you will build next,” Donahue said, according to an Army release.

Donahue was promoted to four stars in December 2024, when he took over U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, with it, command of NATO’s Allied Land Command in Izmir, Turkey. The combined headquarters developed the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, a warfighting concept that integrates allied land forces, drones and data under NATO’s defense plans for its eastern flank, according to the Army.

Donahue “saw the need to change, developed a plan, inspired others and built the processes to ensure it endures well beyond his tenure — and allies have bought in,” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander Europe, said at the ceremony, according to the Army release.

Donahue was also the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, photographed in night vision boarding the final C-17 out of Kabul in August 2021.

Brett McGurk, who served as special presidential envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State, told CBS News that Donahue is “among the most consequential commanders of his generation,” and retired Gen. Tony Thomas, a former head of U.S. Special Operations Command, called him a “generational leader.”

The ouster has drawn criticism from retired military leaders and lawmakers across the aisle.

The “decision to force [Donahue] out says far more about Hegseth than it does about General Donahue,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wrote in a post on X last week, calling the move “yet another unforced error from a Secretary leading the Pentagon with bro-culture bravado rather than restraint, humility and careful stewardship of the finest fighting force in the world.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe, called Donahue the “best soldier in the Army today” in his own post. “Kremlin and terrorist organizations will be relieved to know that he will soon be gone.”

European officials fear the exit foreshadows a U.S. drawdown from the roughly 80,000 American troops on the continent, Newsweek reported.

The news came out just days after Hegseth criticized European allies over low defense spending and announced a six-month review of U.S. forces in Europe.

Retired Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, wrote in The Atlantic that the dismissals “raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance of military miscalculation will grow dramatically.”

Lt. Gen. Kevin Admiral, who leads the Army’s III Armored Corps, is the frontrunner to permanently replace Donahue in Wiesbaden, a U.S. military official told Newsweek, though no final decision has been made and the nomination would require Senate confirmation.

Donahue will formally hand the NATO post to its deputy, British Lt. Gen. Jez Bennett, at a July 9 ceremony in Izmir, Turkey. Bennett will serve as acting commander until another American officer is assigned, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe spokesman Col. Martin O’Donnell told CBS News.

Donahue closed his farewell remarks with a question.

“When people ask me, ‘Hey CD, what was it like to be a part of United States Army Europe and Africa?’ I only have to tell them how proud and unbelievably grateful I am to have been a part of the United States Army’s premier warfighting headquarters.”

Ukraine’s 427th Separate Unmanned Systems Regiment, known as Rarog, posted the unverified night-vision clip to its Telegram channel last month showing an interceptor closing on a one-way attack drone and a flash at the moment of contact. The unit flies Ukrainian-built interceptors alongside foreign systems, and did not specify which it used.

Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow Rob Lee shared the clip and called it the first public video he believed of Perennial Autonomy’s Merops, the American interceptor, “targeting Shahed/Geran one-way attack drones.”

The footage lands as the Army is moving to build a version of that drone it can call its own.

On June 23, the Army opened a Low-Cost Interceptor program at an industry day in Arlington, Virginia, seeking complete systems for under $1 million and government-owned designs it can hand to any manufacturer, with a first live-fire demonstration set for the fall.

The program would let the Army break the interceptor into pieces, buy or lease the design, and use contract manufacturers to build it — so it owns the weapon rather than depending on a single prime, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in May.

The Army does not own the Merops design and cannot produce them at will. The new program would change that, letting it hand a government-owned blueprint to any manufacturer rather than buy from only a single contracting company.

The vendor that the U.S government appears to be seeking independence from in this case is Perennial Autonomy, the maker of Merops.

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt launched the defense startup in 2023 and signed a three-year, $500 million contract with the Pentagon in May — the largest single counter-drone deal it’s ever awarded — making the company uniquely influential to military supply chains.

The Pentagon turned to Merops after burning through hundreds of Patriot missiles defending against Iranian Shaheds, each Patriot costing more than $3 million and drawing down stockpiles Ukraine has long depended on for its own air defense.

The Army bought 13,000 Merops in eight days after the Iran war began in late February, at roughly $15,000 each, Driscoll told Congress in April.

“They protected U.S. troops,” the Army secretary told lawmakers, defending the cost as a fraction of what a Shahed costs to produce. “We will make that trade all day long.”

A Merops costs roughly $15,000 against a Shahed that runs $30,000 to $50,000.

The interceptor is a roughly three-foot, fixed-wing drone that flies up to 174 mph (280 km/h) and homes in on its target using thermal radar or radio-frequency sensors when its links are jammed.

It has downed more than 4,000 Russian drones in Ukraine, German production partner Twentyfour Industries said.

The system has conservatively accounted for 40% of all Shahed destruction in Ukraine, Brig. Gen. Curtis King, commanding general of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, told reporters at a Polish base in November.

NATO has already built Merops interceptors into the forces protecting its eastern flank.

Romania folded Merops into its national air defenses on June 29, joining Poland in fielding it, and Lithuania bought 48 interceptors earlier this year. Officials said they are planning a deployment along the Danube corridor, where Russian drones have repeatedly crossed from the war next door, according to Reuters.

But the system still faces technical difficulties.

In mid-June, footage circulated of Merops interceptors failing to down a Russian drone, and a Romanian field test in April logged a failure the military attributed to “target maneuvering,” according to Greek publication Pronews. The outlet still called Merops one of the most effective low-cost tools in the drone war.

Ukraine’s military also flies an array of homegrown drones that run $1,000 to $3,000 a unit and have downed thousands of Russian drones since 2024, on a cost exchange that runs as steep as 85-to-1 in Kyiv’s favor.

Kyiv asked the Pentagon last August to help scale that manufacturing, offering to co-produce its cheap interceptors for the U.S.

Washington declined.

The Sea Baby, a strike boat built and operated by Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, can now carry six to eight FPV drones in side compartments that open during an attack, alongside thermobaric Shmel rockets, according to Russian accounts of the boats operating around the Kinburn Spit, roughly 40 miles east of Odesa, shared by Forbes.

Ukrainian officials count on the autonomous vessels’ ability to move closer toward Russian military positions than land-based launchers could, with the SBU assuming a range of 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) on a 4,400-pound (2,000-kilogram) payload. Some of the drones in the cargo hold are guided by fiber-optic cable, leaving them immune to the radio jamming that downs ordinary FPVs, according to Forbes.

Ukraine has turned nearly everything it fields into an FPV launcher. Sea drones carrying fiber-optic FPVs struck the Russian ports of Tuapse and Novorossiysk in September. Several companies have rigged ground robots to fire the same drones, and both sides have flown balloons carrying them.

“The SBU became the first in the world to pioneer this new kind of naval warfare,” Brig. Gen. Ivan Lukashevych said at an unveiling of the Sea Baby’s latest generation in October 2025, “and we continue to advance it.”

Ukraine fields two distinct naval drone families.

The Sea Baby is developed and operated by the SBU, Ukraine’s domestic security service. The Magura – built by Uforce for the GUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate – is a separate system with its own lineage and export path.

The Sea Baby is primarily remote-piloted from a mobile ground station but carries AI-assisted targeting and navigation systems that allow it to operate autonomously when communications are jammed or degraded – a design imperative born from Russia’s intense electronic warfare environment over the Black Sea.

American forces have begun using the boats themselves.

U.S. special forces sank a target ship with a Ukrainian Magura at the Balikatan 2026 exercise off the Philippines on June 24, the first use of the technology in the Indo-Pacific.

The interest is not one-off. A cheap, expendable boat that can carry a cluster of attack drones to within striking range is exactly the kind of weapon the United States is looking for as it prepares for a possible war with China across the Pacific’s vast distances.

“Magura’s successes on the Ukrainian-Russian front confirm their value for use in the Indo-Pacific region,” Oleg Roginsky, chief executive of Uforce, the London-based startup that makes the Magura, told Bloomberg last week.

Uforce is in talks with Indo-Pacific buyers and weighing at least two production sites in the region, Roginsky said. Ukraine barred weapons exports in 2022 to keep its arms at the front, and only began opening that market in 2025.

Ukrainian naval drones have sunk or damaged roughly a dozen Russian warships since 2022 and forced the Black Sea Fleet to pull its main operations back to Novorossiysk, the U.S. Naval Institute reported in September.

Each boat costs a few hundred thousand dollars, below the price of a single modern torpedo.

The Pentagon is studying the lesson as it shifts focus toward a possible conflict with China.

The U.S. Navy expects to field thousands of small uncrewed surface vessels across the Indo-Pacific by 2030, Capt. Garrett Miller, who leads its Surface Development Group One, said at a Navy symposium on April 20, as reported by USNI News.

In a report last July, the Center for Strategic and International Studies urged the U.S. military to copy Kyiv’s acquisition methods, arguing that “unlike theoretical models or peacetime pilots, Ukraine’s innovations in defense acquisition are battlefield tested.”

And Ukraine has continued to innovate. Its Sub Sea Baby underwater drone struck an Improved Kilo-class submarine at its pier in Novorossiysk on Dec. 15, the first time an unmanned underwater vehicle has hit a submarine in port, the SBU said.

Russia denied any damage, but satellite imagery taken the following day showed a 9-meter crater in the pier, the submarine visibly lower in the water, and the vessel, later identified as the B-271 Kolpino, unmoved at its berth more than a month later. Ukrainian and independent analysts assessed it as a mission kill.

NATO is already training with Kyiv’s tactics, too.

Ukraine’s navy led a NATO red team and beat the alliance’s blue force in all five scenarios at the REPMUS naval-drone exercise in Portugal in September, the first time it had run the opposing force.