Kyiv says Hegseth is deliberately withholding Patriot missiles paid for by allies

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has for weeks failed to approve the transfer of a major shipment of Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine, even though Ukraine's allies have already paid for the weapons. This was reported to the Kyiv Independent by a senior Ukrainian official and two Ukrainian military officers, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter. “The contracts for the Patriot missiles are sitting on Hegseth's desk, but he's not signing them,” one of the officials told the outlet, and in Kyiv more and more people believe that Washington is deliberately holding back the shipment as a form of pressure. On Monday, Volodymyr Zelensky himself spoke aboutcertain vital supplies being delayed, pointing to the US Department of Defense. A US government official called the accusations false, and the Pentagon did not respond to the outlet's questions, while another Ukrainian defense official said that as of Monday morning the situation had not changed, and Hegseth still had not signed off on the transfer.

The delay comes at the worst possible time, as Russia attacks Ukrainian civilian infrastructure with ballistic missiles almost daily, and the Patriot is one of the most effective weapons against them — and Ukraine has already run out of them entirely once before. According to Zelensky, the United States delivers only twelve Patriot missiles to Ukraine per month, so Kyiv is trying to make up the shortfall from other sources; for example, Ukrainian embassies are individually approaching governments that might have reserves. For operational reasons, the Ukrainians are not disclosing how many interceptor missiles are currently available, but a senior official described the withheld batch as “significant.” A NATO official told the outlet that air-defense deliveries under the PURL mechanism are continuing, while another acknowledged that some shipments may be delayed, though in his view this is probably not for political reasons.

Few in Kyiv believe that, because the Patriot issue fits into a longer pattern. Ukraine's early-warning system, which relies on US intelligence data to detect the launch of Russian ballistic missiles, has gone down several times in recent weeks. American officials have attributed this to bad weather, Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed a software glitch, and Zelensky told NBC on Sunday that intelligence cooperation had been “blocked” for a time. During the same period, Starlink and the military Starshield service also experienced disruptions, which severely hampered the deployment of Ukrainian drones, including interceptor drones that hunt Russian jet-powered drones. “First it was the missile-warning system, now this. It's clear what they're doing,” one Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent, calling the refusal to sign a political decision. This is not the first time Hegseth has disrupted the resupply of Ukraine's air defenses: in the summer of 2025, the Pentagon, citing US stockpiles, halted weapons shipments—including Patriot missiles—and it took Trump himself to lift the freeze.

Behind the scenes lies the dispute that erupted between the Trump administration and Kyiv over the Russian oil industry. Amid fuel prices that spiked because of the war with Iran and under the pressure of the November 3 midterm elections, the American president has been increasingly vocal in blaming Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries—without mentioning that he himself fired Patriot missiles at the Persian state. On October 9, he reached an agreement with Putin that Russia could continue to supply diesel to the US and the world market despite sanctions. According to a senior Ukrainian official, all of this is a matter of domestic political calculation: Trump “cannot admit he was wrong about the war with Iran, so purely for campaign purposes he has returned to the old narrative of blaming Ukraine.” If the accusation is true, then this time Washington is withholding not weapons bought with its own money, but ones paid for by its European allies to defend Ukraine—and the bill is being footed by the Ukrainian civilians whose homes the next Russian ballistic missile happens to hit.

Ugh