At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey on July 8, Trump announced that the US would grant Ukraine a license to domestically produce Patriot missile interceptors.
What happened in Ankara
The announcement came during a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the summit. Trump was characteristically blunt about the arrangement.
“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it.”
Zelenskyy had formally requested a licensing agreement just weeks earlier, in late May 2026. This one went from formal request to presidential announcement in roughly six weeks.
