Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded for interceptors, the only weapon that can shoot down ballistic projectiles, after Ukraine was unable to down any of the missiles fired by Russia.
He said it was “simply nonsensical that, in the modern world, production has still not been scaled up to the level actually required to protect people from ballistic terror”.
Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia fired 351 drones and 68 missiles overnight into Monday, targeting mainly Kyiv, and all 29 ballistic missiles struck their targets.
“Russians are certainly using the fact that there is a serious deficit of interceptor missiles now, in Ukraine and the world,” said Ukraine Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat.
Ukraine’s defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov also warned that Russia is deliberately ramping up ballistic missile attacks on a scale unseen before, exploiting the acute shortage of Patriot interceptors.
This comes as ahead of the Nato summit in Ankara, Turkey today, US president Donald Trump said that a resolution to the more than four-year-old war in Ukraine is “getting closer than people realise” and that he will talk about Ukraine during talks in Turkey this week at a Nato summit.