Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba doesn’t mince his words. There’s one item his country desperately needs to fend off Russia’s relentless missile attacks.
“Give us the damn Patriots,” he demanded. Originating in the United States, Patriot surface-to-air missiles are the best defense system to combat the ballistic missiles that have been raining down on Ukraine with increasing intensity in recent days.
“If we had enough air defense systems, namely Patriots, we would be able to protect not only the lives of our people, but also our economy from destruction,” he added.
The need for such defenses is all too clear for residents of Kyiv. Just an hour before Kuleba sat down with POLITICO at the foreign ministry on Monday, in broad, mid-morning daylight, the Ukrainian capital came under attack from Russian ballistic missiles.
Patriot is an acronym for Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target. It’s the thing that launches the missiles not the missiles themselves.
