Trump grants Kyiv Patriots licences: What’s next in the Russia-Ukraine war?

Kyiv, Ukraine – Patriot missile interceptors are the most coveted Western-made weapon Ukraine needs – right now and every night when Russia attacks.

Frequent Russian strikes depleted Ukraine’s stock of the pricey United States-made interceptors – and US President Donald Trump has now offered hope, giving Kyiv a licence to make them.

“A little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it, it’s very complex actually. But it’s – you’ll figure out the complexity quickly,” Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a NATO summit in Turkiye on Wednesday. “This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough.”

Trump has not specified when the production might start – and said that Washington would hold on to its own stash. Ukraine said it will attempt to master domestic production as soon as possible.

In the short-term perspective, Ukraine “perhaps, gets nothing,” according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.

However, “access to US technologies can significantly speed up or develop Ukraine’s domestic program of ballistic and counter-ballistic missiles,” he told Al Jazeera.

Ukraine may opt to produce cheaper and simpler missiles, and it may take less than a year, he said.

“However, we can’t rule out that such a programme already exists and has only been made public,” he said.

Ukraine seeks to produce missiles that are only part of the Patriot surface-to-air systems that also consist of missile launchers, a radar and a control van. The van lets the system move around to avoid detection and consequent strikes.

But it is other “little birdies” that make the difference on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war.

A Ukrainian spy drone recently froze 80 metres above a forest patch in the no-man’s land in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The drone’s operator, who was sitting in a bunker dozens of kilometres west of the patch, saw a hole in the ground where a Russian soldier clad in grey-green camouflage was hiding.

The soldier sneaked there as part of Moscow’s new tactic of dispatching two or three “infiltrators” to bypass porous Ukrainian positions – because larger groups are easier to detect and destroy.

The drone’s operator, whose video stream Al Jazeera observed in real time from his commander’s laptop, clicked and clacked to call for help.

In less than a minute, an explosives-laden kamikaze drone flew right into the hole. The spy drone’s operator yelled a triumphant expletive – and flew his drone farther east.

“I receive streams from 20, 30 drones at once,” the unit’s commander told Al Jazeera, withholding his and his unit’s name and exact location in accordance with wartime protocol.

The scene is but an episode in the daily life and death of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, but it puts an end to the millennia-old concept of a “front line,” where soldiers actually see – and kill – each other.

‘Network-centric warfare’

When the war began in 2022, it was two ex-Soviet armies fighting each other using World War II stratagems and relying on tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery that now seem hopelessly extinct.

Instead, “things are moving towards further development of the conception of network-centric warfare,” Pavel Luzin, a military analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.

He referred to real-time connection between commanders, servicemen and their weaponry that helps achieve faster command speed and combat advantage.

And as a conscription and desertion crisis widens, Ukraine’s military increasingly relies on fast technological solutions such as ground robots that blow up enemy bunkers, fire machineguns, deliver food and ammunition, and rescue wounded soldiers.

“If we didn’t have a shortage of soldiers, the generals would still be sending soldiers to the front line,” Ihor Chaikivsky, head of the Robotic Complexes company that produces cart-like ground robots in the western city of Ternopil, told Al Jazeera. “We didn’t want to go to the front line, didn’t want to die in the trenches, so we started using ground robots.”

While some solutions may seem low-tech, others use artificial intelligence with lethal precision.

Hornets, inexpensive mid-range strike drones made by Swift Beat, a company of Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, use AI to identify Russian fuel tankers, supply trucks and military columns – and cannot be stopped by electronic jamming.

A Ukrainian drone operator is anticipating the detection of enemy soldiers to be “outsourced” to AI.

“I could have missed someone in the foliage. AI won’t, and then there’s gonna be nowhere to hide,” Andriy told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name in accordance with wartime protocol.

Ukrainian military experts: Russia needs more air defence but can still hit back

Meanwhile, Ukrainian drone and missile strikes have gone beyond Russia’s European region, using one of Moscow’s biggest miscalculations.

Instead of investing in air defence, the Kremlin focused on the manufacturing of costly missiles.

As a result, Russia’s enormous size – with a dwindling population of less than 145 million, its area is almost as large as the United States and India combined – makes air defence increasingly difficult.

“Their air defence can’t handle their tasks effectively with the tools they have,” Lieutenant-General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera. “They need a lot more [equipment] in the wider spectrum of air and missile defence.”

On Tuesday, Russia’s largest oil refinery in the city of Omsk in southwestern Siberia stopped operating after a Ukrainian drone strike a day earlier.

On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy proclaimed that the war would be won “in the skies”.

“We have moved into the air domain. And in the air, we are already competitive,” Zelenskyy told The Financial Times. “The decisive struggle will take place in the skies.”

But his former top general warned that Ukrainian strikes alone will not yield a decisive victory.

“These attacks are expensive, technologically demanding and ultimately reciprocal,” Valerii Zaluzhnyi, whom Zelenskyy sacked in 2024 and who currently serves as Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, wrote in an op-ed published by The Telegraph on Wednesday.

“Russia retains the ability to strike back with equal or greater force. Neither side can rely on this form of warfare to produce a decisive strategic outcome,” he wrote.

And when Russia strikes back, the results are often harrowing.

“I always thought that nothing would happen to our apartment building because it was protected by new high-rises,” Kateryna Babich, whose first-floor apartment in central Kyiv was hit by a Russian missile strike early on Friday, told Al Jazeera.

The shockwave destroyed her windows and most of the doors. A wardrobe fell on her diabetic son, who suffered concussion and a knee injury.

The attack involved 68 missiles and 351 drones, killing 27 people in Kyiv and the surrounding region.

Observers say that it is hard to predict when Russian President Vladimir Putin will be convinced to resume peace talks.

“Kyiv can keep on striking [Russia’s] infrastructure, the question is at what stage these successes can be transformed into deals,” said Mitrokhin, of Germany’s Bremen University. “And that’s the tango for two. It’s hard to determine at what moment Putin will step away from his insistence on total confrontation.”

Kyiv’s recent successes seemed to have convinced the White House to resume peace talks – on a new level.

“Ukraine managed to convince the American side that the logic of peace talks should be changed, that now we don’t have to agree on concessions from Ukraine, but talk about a ceasefire,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera.

“The Kremlin’s not ready, but the American side is gravitating towards this scenario,” he said.