Ukraine’s defense minister said Wednesday his country has received U.S-made Patriot surface-to-air guided missile systems it has long craved and which Kyiv hopes will help shield it from Russian strikes during the war.
“Today, our beautiful Ukrainian sky becomes more secure because Patriot air defense systems have arrived in Ukraine,” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in a tweet.
Ukrainian officials have previously said the arrival of Patriot systems, which Washington agreed to send last October, would be a major boost and a milestone in the war against Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
The Patriot can target aircraft, cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles. Russia has used that weaponry to bombard Ukraine, including residential areas and civilian infrastructure, especially the power supply over the winter.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said late Tuesday that delivery of the system would be a landmark event, allowing Ukrainians to knock out Russian targets at a greater distance. Reznikov thanked the people of the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, without saying how many systems had been delivered nor when.
Germany’s federal government website on Tuesday listed a Patriot system as among the military items delivered within the past week to Ukraine, and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock confirmed that to lawmakers in Berlin on Wednesday.
Reznikov said he had first asked for Patriot systems when he visited the U.S. in August 2021, five months before the full-scale invasion by the Kremlin’s forces and seven years after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. He described possessing the system
as “a dream.”