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The European Union is set to provide Ukraine with €6.1 billion in additional assistance to help the war-weary country purchase military equipment, notably the Patriot interceptors badly needed to shoot down Russia’s devastating ballistic missiles.
The funding, announcedon Friday, will come from the bloc’s €90 billion support loan, which reserves €28.3 billion for military aid and €16.7 billion for budget aid this year.
The loan’s “Made In Europe” requirement will be lifted to procure Patriots, which are made in the United States, and drones, which depend on Chinese components.
The newly allocated €6.1 billion represents the final allocation under the €28.3 billion envelope. Payments are being made in gradual instalments after Brussels checks and verifies the contracts that Kyiv signs with private companies.
So far, €8.35 billion in defence funding has been wired.
“The Ukrainian military edge depends on the rapid availability of critical products in the required quantities and within very short time frames,” Andrius Kubilius, the European Commissioner for Defence, said at a press conference.
“Accelerating EU deliveries through de-stocking, reprioritising orders and ramping up production remains crucial.“
The news comes as allies race to supply Ukraine with air defence systems as Russia escalates its bombing campaign, including through jet-powered drones, ahead of a winter that EU officials expect to be the harshest yet of the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimates his army will need about 300 Patriot interceptors to make it through the winter safely.
The scarcity of PAC-3 interceptors, made by US defence giant Lockheed Martin, has severely constrained Kyiv’s ability to repel Russia’s ballistic missiles effectively. Moscow has exploited the weakness to double down on lethal airstrikes.
The war in the Middle East has compounded the backlog in production chains, which was burdensome to begin with. A single PAC-3 interceptor has a 24-month manufacturing lead time and a price tag of roughly $4 million (€3.45 billion).
In a bid to speed things up, Brussels is seeking to convince member states that still have Patriot interceptors in their national stockpiles to donate them to Ukraine and replace them later on with the deliveries scheduled for 2027 – in other words, a swap.
“The Ukrainians, as we understand, will put all the efforts now to have those interceptors as much as possible before winter,” Kubilius said.
“NATO is also very intensively working on that,” he added, referring to the alliance’s PURL programme, which mobilises US-made weaponry for Ukraine.
“I hope that that will be really realised in an effective way.”
Kubilius spoke to the press after the first meeting of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance, which intends to combine the former’s industrial scale with the latter’s innovative prowess to foster joint production of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The meeting gathered 18 companies from the bloc and 9 from Ukraine, he said.
The alliance builds upon the EU-Ukraine Drone Deal signed in July.