CNN gets rare look at Ukraine’s empty Patriot system

A Patriot air defense battery inside Ukraine has sat with empty launch tubes for weeks, its crew unable to fire because the country has nearly exhausted its stock of interceptor missiles, CNN reported after gaining rare access to the system.

CNN was the first outlet allowed to visit an operational Patriot unit on Ukrainian territory, agreeing not to disclose the system’s model or location. The battery’s chief engineer, identified only by his first name, Dmytro, for security reasons, told CNN he had not seen the launcher fire in six weeks. The first time his unit ran out of interceptors entirely was in December 2025.

“This is a really heartbreaking sight when you have equipment but you’re not able to intercept any missile,” Dmytro said. “Ballistic missiles are flying over your head and you are not able to do anything with it, and behind you, there are civilians.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN Ukraine needs 5 percent of the U.S. Patriot stockpile to survive the winter but currently has access to only 1 percent. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since May 2022, driven by a sustained rise in Russian ballistic missile strikes.

A separate report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that U.S. stocks of Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors have fallen from more than 2,300 before the war between Israel and Iran began in June to roughly 800, with THAAD interceptor inventories nearly halved. Coalition forces defending against Iranian missiles used an average of 225 interceptors per day during the first four days of that conflict, according to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, against a Lockheed Martin production rate of 620 PAC-3 interceptors for all of 2025, or about 1.7 per day.

The Pentagon signed a seven-year deal with Lockheed Martin in January to raise annual PAC-3 production to 2,000 missiles by 2030.

Zelensky told CNN he has offered Raytheon and Lockheed Martin full ownership and control of any interceptor manufacturing plant the companies would permit inside Ukraine.

“It will be your company,” Zelensky recalled telling the manufacturers. “It will be our brains, our hands, our engineers. And I will do my best to build the great company… for them. Because I don’t need to sell [the interceptors] to anybody else. I need for my country.”

At the NATO summit in Ankara in June, President Trump offered Ukraine licenses to begin manufacturing Patriot interceptors domestically. Representatives from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin subsequently traveled to Kyiv to meet with Zelensky, but Trump later expressed doubts that the licensing arrangement would proceed. A White House official told CNN no decisions had been made or guarantees given on Patriot interceptor production, citing the priority of protecting U.S. technology.

“I want to get it,” Zelensky said. “I think his word is the word of president of the United States. And I hope that I will get it.”

Asked by CNN whether Ukraine could build a Patriot battery and interceptor immediately if intellectual property restrictions were set aside, Dmytro said it could not. “This is a very complex procedure, and it requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of technical information,” he said.

Ukrainian defense company Fire Point has separately been developing the FP-7.x, a lower-cost interceptor under its FREYJA air and missile defense project, intended to reduce reliance on imported PAC-3 missiles. The system has undergone controlled flight testing but has not yet demonstrated repeated ballistic missile interceptions in the way the operationally established PAC-3 has.