President Volodymyr Zelenskyy explained that the shortage of missiles for the SAMP/T air defense system has always been a problem for Ukraine.
Points of attention
- President Zelenskyy addresses the persistent issue of missile shortages for Ukraine's SAMP/T air defense system during a briefing.
- Ukraine is working closely with Italy and France to acquire missiles for air defense systems, but challenges in the supply chain persist.
- Zelenskyy suggests the possibility of exchanging SAMP/T systems for Patriot and collaborating with Germany on the IRIS-T air defense system to mitigate the missile shortage.
Zelenskyy explained the situation with the shortage of SAMP/T air defense missiles
At the briefing, the President was asked to comment on media information that Ukraine has practically run out of SAMP/T missiles.
With SAMP/T missiles, there was never a shortage of them. This is a question of these systems. We are grateful to Italy, we are grateful to France, because they gave us what they have in service. And these are complex systems. They are good, but we cannot say that they are an analogue of Patriot — they are cool, they shoot down, but not everything that Patriot shoots down. But we are grateful for these systems. I don't want to say in which regions, but they helped and are helping.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
President of Ukraine
There is one problem with these systems — a large shortage of missiles. And it has been there all the time, it is a constant problem. But I don't want Italy or France to be offended, because they gave us these systems and missiles.
Zelenskyy noted that one of the points that the war taught him was: "where you can take a license from a partner, take it, we'll do it faster."
I didn't get these licenses, I really wanted them, it was very important — Patriot, SAMP/T, Hawk. Although many countries gave us Hawk systems, because they are not in service, they are not new, but they are working. We took them because we understood where we could find missiles, there are many Hawk missiles around the world. With SAMP/T it is difficult. And the replacement for SAMP/T can be Patriot, because it is approximately the same class.
He gave the example of agreements with Germany regarding the IRIS-T air defense system.
We can negotiate with them, because they completely produce these systems. Then we can negotiate and count on a constant monthly quantity from IRIS-T... There are systems that depend on 4 countries and their political will to give us licenses. We are developing this direction little by little.
