US approves Patriot missile sale to Ukraine

The US has approved the sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 missiles to Ukraine for an estimated 2.1 billion dollars. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the decision on Saturday — and warned in the same message that the interceptors could take years to arrive.

The State Department, announcing the approval on Friday, said the sale would improve Ukraine's integrated air and missile defense capabilities. It offered no estimate for when the weapons could be delivered. Zelenskyy supplied the missing figure himself: years.

The arrangement is a sale, not aid. Ukraine will pay full price for the interceptors meant to shield its cities, and it will wait years for them. The other side of the front runs on a different clock: Russian refineries raised crude processing by 25 percent during the recent three-day pause in Ukrainian drone attacks — the first since March — repairing damaged plants in a lull that followed Trump's energy ceasefire and the lifting of sanctions on Russian diesel.

The rest of the war economy points the same way. Eleven EU states are drawing diesel from strategic reserves because sanctions cut off the cheapest supplier and turned the bloc into a premium buyer. Trump, for his part, has boasted that the US is making a fortune from the oil prices the war pushed up. The country under missile fire now buys its air defense from Washington at list price, on a delivery schedule the seller declines to state.

The approval follows what has been described as a White House delay in greenlighting the sale. The State Department announcement reads like any commercial notice: a capability, a price, a buyer. Zelenskyy's gratitude and his warning arrived in the same post.

The statement included no delivery date. The 2.1-billion-dollar estimate was exact.