Trump says he plans to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine

Skylar Woodhouse and María Paula Mijares Torres, Bloomberg News on Jul 13, 2025

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President Donald Trump said the U.S. will send more Patriot air-defense batteries to Ukraine, which Kyiv has said it needs to protect itself from Russian airstrikes.

“We’re not paying anything for them,” Trump told reporters Sunday on his way back to the White House. “But we will get them Patriots, which they desperately need.”

The move signaled a change of heart for Trump, who had held off approving any new weapons shipments to Ukraine since the start of his second term. Instead, he had sought to coax Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, arguing that he could get a halt to the conflict where his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, had failed.

Ukraine had been receiving weapons from the U.S. but only with money remaining from Biden’s time in office. Trump had previously refused to consider seeking additional funds, arguing that it would only harden Putin’s stance and dim chances to end the fighting.

On Sunday, Trump said that the U.S. is supplying sophisticated weapons and that Ukraine will “pay us 100% for them.”

Last week, Trump said that he would make an announcement regarding Russia on Monday, but he declined to say whether that would include new sanctions being considered by Congress.

The president added that he is very disappointed with Putin. “He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening,” he said.

NATO chief Mark Rutte is scheduled to meet with Trump on Monday.

During his presidential campaign and his first months in office, Trump had cast Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the obstacle to peace, and bemoaned the U.S. military and financial support his country has received. In February, he derided Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” and a “dictator.”

But Trump expressed growing exasperation with his Russian counterpart in recent weeks as Putin unleashed a massive aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities and sidestepped calls for a ceasefire. He said earlier that the U.S. would send more defensive weapons to Ukraine, reversing a Pentagon decision to pause some shipments.

That halt had provoked fears that the U.S. was backing away from Ukraine for good and unwilling to intervene to repel Russia’s slow but steady advance.

Zelenskiy said an earlier meeting with U.S. and European allies in Rome stoked optimism that Trump would ramp up military aid to the war-battered country, including air defense.

The meeting of the so-called coalition of the willing — which included a senior Trump envoy — came hours after another deadly Russian drone-and-missile assault on Kyiv. The Ukrainian leader said he’d had a “positive dialogue” with the U.S. president over the delivery of more Patriots.

“It’s crucial that — following our constructive and very positive conversations with President Trump — we have all necessary political signals on the resumption of aid shipments,” Zelenskyy told reporters in the Italian capital Thursday. “Now we are working at staff level to ensure timely deliveries to Ukraine.”

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(With assistance from Nick Wadhams.)