US President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement on July 9 that he will approve a license for Ukraine to produce its own Patriot missile interceptors signals a potential breakthrough for Kyiv – though one that could take years to produce concrete results. “We're going to give a license to you to make Patriots [. . .] This way, you can't complain that we're not giving them enough,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara in Turkey. Read moreTrump says he will allow Ukraine to make its own Patriot missiles Where are the Patriots? The Ukrainian president has warned for weeks that the country is running out of Patriot interceptors, hampering its ability to defend Ukrainian cities from a near-constant barrage of Russian ballistic missiles. Ukraine “intercepts drones as well as cruise missiles because they don’t require any sophisticated interceptors. Yet it’s completely different with ballistic missiles. Ukraine is completely out of Patriot missiles, so they desperately need them”, said Huseyn Aliyev, an expert on the war in Ukraine at the University of Glasgow. Compounding the problem for Kyiv, Russia has stepped up its use of ballistic missiles precisely because it knows that Ukraine doesn't have enough interceptors, added Aliyev.