ANKARA: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Washington would grant Kyiv “the right to make” prized Patriot air-defence systems to repel deadly Russian strikes, without providing a timeline for the pledge.

Ukraine has been struggling to down Russian ballistic missiles since this year’s US-Israeli war against Iran hit supplies of the crucial US-made Patriot interceptors.

“So one of the things we’re going to be talking about is we’re going to give a licence to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool, right,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Nato summit in Ankara.

“We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out all right,” he said. Russia’s missile and drone strikes on Wednesday killed 10 people across Ukraine.

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2026