Russia is putting more and more weight behind the one class of weapon Ukraine has the fewest means to stop — ballistic missiles. After every large strike the conversation returns to the same request: more interceptors for Patriot. Ukraine does need them, in large numbers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already spoken about the hundreds of additional interceptors required to protect the energy system through the winter.
In a column for Ukrainska Pravda, Sahaidachnyi Security Center Co-founder and Director Lesia Ogryzko argues that the problem is much larger than the next batch of missiles from partners.
Ukraine sits inside a global imbalance. Ballistic strike systems are being built faster and in greater numbers than the West can build the means to intercept them.
Russian output of ballistic and quasi-ballistic missiles is estimated at 800 to 1,100 a year. North Korean supplies push the combined total past 1,200, with Pyongyang having ordered a 2.5-fold increase in production in January. That is over a hundred missiles a month, and each complex target typically absorbs two or three interceptors on the way down.
Patriot operators in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific are facing missile threats of their own, and demand for PAC-3 has climbed faster than anyone can manufacture it. Lesia Ogryzko is clear that Ukraine should keep asking, since political limits that once looked fixed have moved before. What she warns against is a strategy that assumes an ally will eventually open its depots.
Nor does time solve it on the schedule Ukraine needs. Lockheed Martin built over 600 PAC-3 MSE in 2025, and American contracts point towards roughly 2,000 a year by the end of 2030. FREYJA, the flagship project of the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition that Ukraine and nine European states launched in July, is one of the most significant things Ukraine has brought to European defence during the full-scale war — and neither timeline reaches even 2028.
That leaves an uncomfortable premise to plan around: for several years, Ukraine will not be able to intercept everything. The column turns that premise into five lines of work.
- Expanding long-range strike capability, with Russian missile production, its component suppliers and launchers as priority targets.
- A state programme to move, duplicate and harden underground whatever has to survive systematic strikes — command, medicine, communications, energy, water — beginning with an audit of the tunnels, mine workings and protected sites Ukraine already has.
- Treating FREYJA as a European priority with the funding and speed that implies, with Ukraine contributing the operational experience no other participant can supply.
- A public campaign for existing interceptors that reaches beyond government-to-government channels into parliament, the military, civil society and the Ukrainian diaspora.
- Industrial arrangements with Washington on licensing, localisation and supply chains, which do nothing for this winter and everything for 2029.
The mistake now would be to reduce the ballistic threat to the question of who else might hand over missiles, when the question that matters is what the state does if there are not enough missiles in the world. Ukraine cannot change that arithmetic quickly. What it can change is how fatal the arithmetic proves to be.
Read the full column in Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian).