The new patriot system, the second that the United States has sent to Ukraine, will come from Poland, where it has been protecting a rotational force of American troops who will be returning to the US, officials said.
According to the officials, the system could be deployed to Ukraine’s front lines in the next several days, depending on any maintenance or modifications it needs.Considered one of the United States’ best air defence weapons, the Patriot includes a powerful radar system and mobile launchers that fire missiles at incoming projectiles.
It is also one of the scarcest weapons systems in the US arsenal. Pentagon officials refuse to disclose how many it has, but one senior military official said that the army has deployed only 14 of them, in the US and around the world.
Notably, patriots are also held by American allies and two of those nations have sent a couple to Ukraine, but US officials say they hope European powers will send more.
Pentagon officials did not want to move any batteries from the US. There is a patriot battery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for training American and Ukrainian troops, but moving it would take away training, the officials said. Other batteries protecting bases and troops in the US, including in Hawaii, were either deemed too far away or necessary for homeland defence.Defence secretary Lloyd Austin and other senior Pentagon leaders have appealed to European allies to transfer their systems to Ukraine.
Two other nations have responded to Ukraine’s plea for more Patriots. Germany has so far deployed one Patriot system, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said a second would be deployed by the end of June. The Netherlands has also deployed a Dutch-American battery in Ukraine, and negotiations are underway to send a second.
The Biden administration officials hope the deployment of another US patriot system will nudge allies to do the same.
During US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Kyiv last month, Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine urgently needed “seven batteries, of which two batteries are necessary, and they were necessary so that we could protect the city of Kharkiv and the entire region of Kharkiv.”
Beyond Kharkiv, Ukraine must take urgent steps to protect Odesa in the south, military analysts said, as well as the country’s electrical grid.
In recent months, a barrage of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s power plants and substations has severely hobbled energy infrastructure, forcing Ukrainian authorities to order nationwide rolling blackouts. This has raised concerns about what will happen when the cold weather arrives and the use of heating devices increases the load on the energy system.
The US officials said there was little high-level debate over whether to supply Ukraine with another patriot. But officials said that Austin and general Charles Q Brown Junior, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, debated which of the US Patriots to send.
The two men assessed that the Pentagon could move a patriot battery in Poland, which had the benefit of being next door to Ukraine.
The issue is again expected to come up this week when Austin and general Brown travel to Belgium for Nato and allied defence meetings.
“I think you can expect to see air defence will, for all the obvious reasons, be a topic of discussion,” major general Patrick S Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday.
The patriot is by far the most expensive single weapon system that the United States has supplied to Ukraine, at a total cost of about USD 1.1 billion: USD 400 million for the system and USD 690 million for the missiles.
