Zelenskyy asked Poland and Germany for more missile interceptors

Ukraine’s president has admitted publicly that even a working supply deal with the world’s top missile manufacturer isn’t enough to stop what Russia is throwing at his country every month. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine has secured agreements with the United States for a regular monthly supply of interceptor missiles, but confirmed that even those deliveries fall short of what Ukraine actually needs to defend against Russia’s ongoing missile campaign.

“Who has anti-missiles and systems? First and foremost, the manufacturer, the United States of America. Can they help? We’re working on it. Will they supply us missiles every month? Yes, we have agreements. Is that enough missiles? No,” Zelenskyy said.

That shortfall has pushed Ukraine to widen its search for interceptor missiles well beyond Washington. Zelenskyy said Ukraine is currently negotiating with European partners for additional supplies, specifically naming Poland and Germany as countries that already field relevant air defense systems in their own arsenals, alongside ongoing talks with Scandinavian nations that have their own, smaller stockpiles to offer.

“The Germans and Poles can seriously help. Other countries help little by little,” Zelenskyy said.

Just how badly Ukraine needs that additional help becomes clear once the numbers behind Zelenskyy’s warning are laid out. Ukraine’s Air Force published monthly air defense statistics for July showing that out of 195 Russian ballistic missiles detected that month, weapons that follow a high, fast, arcing trajectory and are notoriously difficult to intercept because of their speed, Ukrainian defenses shot down only 29 of them, a success rate of roughly 15%. Another 40 of those missiles failed to reach their intended targets on their own, likely due to malfunctions or guidance failures, leaving the remaining 126 missiles, roughly 65% of everything Russia launched in that category, to strike somewhere inside Ukraine largely unopposed.

The July figures covered three distinct categories of Russian weapons, and the gap between them tells its own story about where Ukraine’s air defenses are winning and where they are struggling. Ukraine detected 265 cruise missiles during the month, weapons like the Kalibr, Kh-101, and Iskander-K that fly lower and slower than ballistic missiles and follow programmed flight paths rather than a purely ballistic arc, and shot down 187 of them, an interception rate above 70%. Against Russia’s massive drone campaign, Ukraine detected 8,653 strike drones, including Shahed, Gerbera, and Italmas models, and intercepted 5,142 of them, putting the success rate against drones at roughly 59%, still far ahead of how Ukraine performed against ballistic threats.

That disparity exists because ballistic missiles genuinely represent the hardest class of weapon to defend against. Systems like Russia’s Iskander, the 48N6DM interceptor missile Russia has adapted for ground-attack use, the hypersonic Zircon, and North Korea’s KN-23, all missiles Ukraine’s Air Force listed among the July ballistic threats, travel at speeds that leave defenders only a matter of seconds to detect, track, and intercept them before impact, a technical challenge that only a small number of specialized systems worldwide, chiefly the American-made Patriot, can reliably handle. That scarcity of capable interceptors is exactly the gap Zelenskyy described when pressing allies for more ballistic-missile-capable systems rather than simply more air defense in general.

The stakes behind those numbers became painfully visible just days before the July statistics were published, when a Russian missile barrage on the night of July 29 into July 30 killed at least eight people across Ukraine, including three children, and separately sent a suspected Kh-101 cruise missile briefly into Polish airspace, prompting Poland to scramble F-16 fighter jets and search for the missile for roughly six minutes before it came down in a field near the village of Tarnava Colony, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) inside Polish territory. Zelenskyy directly linked that deadly attack to the same interceptor shortage reflected in July’s statistics, writing publicly that insufficient or delayed air defense supplies from partners were directly responsible for the destruction and casualties Ukraine experienced that night, and arguing that defending against Russia’s missile threat is a task no single country, including Ukraine itself, can handle alone.

Ukraine’s response to that persistent shortfall extends beyond simply asking allies for more Patriot batteries and PAC-3 interceptors. Zelenskyy has also pushed a domestic and multinational program called FREYJA, formally launched in Paris in July 2026 by a coalition of ten nations, including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, alongside Ukraine. The initiative, with Ukraine serving as system integrator working alongside major defense manufacturers across those partner nations, aims to build what Zelenskyy has described as a genuinely European, sovereign interceptor shield capable of shooting down Russian ballistic missiles by 2027, built around Ukrainian defense company Fire Point’s FP-7.X interceptor and designed specifically to be cheaper and faster to produce at scale than existing Western systems like Patriot.