Fresh off an encouraging NATO summit and significant wins on the battlefield against Russia over the past several weeks, Ukraine is making moves to ensure those gains aren’t in vain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky joined nine other European leaders in Paris on Monday to announce a new anti-ballistic missile coalition. The coalition—whose other members include Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—will help “build a shared antiballistic missile capacity for Europe” through “collective effort, technological openness, and trusted industrial cooperation,” according to a statement by the French government.
Fresh off an encouraging NATO summit and significant wins on the battlefield against Russia over the past several weeks, Ukraine is making moves to ensure those gains aren’t in vain.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky joined nine other European leaders in Paris on Monday to announce a new anti-ballistic missile coalition. The coalition—whose other members include Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—will help “build a shared antiballistic missile capacity for Europe” through “collective effort, technological openness, and trusted industrial cooperation,” according to a statement by the French government.
The coalition’s first order of business, however, will be supporting Ukraine’s own missile defense system. Dubbed FREYJA, the system is meant to be “significantly cheaper and more scalable” than alternatives such as the U.S.-made Patriot interceptor, according to Fire Point, the Ukrainian weapons manufacturer that is building it.
Founded in 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fire Point has already become a key player in the country’s defense ecosystem, with its “Flamingo” cruise missiles and FP-1 strike drones at the heart of Ukraine’s recent success hitting energy targets deep inside Russian territory. Now, the company said, FREYJA will serve as the “foundation for the first European missile defense shield.”
Built off Fire Point’s FP-7.x interceptor, the system will incorporate technology and capabilities from the coalition’s other partners—Fire Point signed an agreement with German radar manufacturer Hensoldt last month, and Zelensky on Monday called out several major European defense firms for their support of the program, including Sweden’s Saab, Germany’s Diehl Defence, and French firms Thales and Safran. “Each of us has important pieces,” the Ukrainian president said. “Together, over the next 12 months, we can build this system at scale.”
It’s an ambitious but necessary timeline as Ukraine continues to face barrages of Russian missiles even as it inflicts pain on Moscow.
“What we’re seeing is Ukraine and European partners trying to find solutions to a very acute problem, which is the fact that Russian forces can launch several ballistic missiles at once and Ukraine and Europe simply don’t have enough air defense capabilities,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, the Russia team lead at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. “We’ve seen in the past Ukrainian forces being able to intercept Russian cruise missiles with some Soviet-era air defense capabilities, and obviously Ukrainian forces have been largely developing quite a bit of interceptors to go after the Russian Shahed drones, but ballistics have always been a significant problem for Ukrainian capabilities,” Stepanenko added. “The coalition is sort of a wake-up call.”
Those aren’t the only new European additions to Ukraine’s arsenal. Zelensky emerged from bilateral talks with French President Emmanuel Macron with a long list of new weapons deals, including licenses to manufacture Safran’s AASM “Hammer” bombs, SCALP cruise missiles (also known as “Storm Shadow”), and Aster-30 surface-to-air missiles—the last two of which France makes in partnership with the United Kingdom and Italy, respectively. Ukraine will also receive Franco-Italian SAMP-T anti-ballistic missile systems as well as 16 French Rafale fighter jets, Zelensky said in a post on X. He also hosted European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Kyiv on Wednesday, touting a soon-to-be-finalized drone deal between the European Union and Ukraine and adding that he expects “financial support from the EU for [Ukraine’s] Anti-Ballistic Missile Program.”
The renewed European push to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia is further evidence of the effect of U.S. President Donald Trump’s retrenchment of Washington away from Europe and Ukraine. Trump has spent the entirety of his second term in the White House criticizing NATO and urging the alliance’s European members to spend more on Ukraine’s defense as well as their own so that Washington can spend less. That dynamic was in full force during last week’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where the alliance’s European member states along with Canada announced tens of billions of dollars in new defense investments and also committed an additional $80 billion in “military equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine.”
But Zelensky also secured an unexpected win from NATO’s playground bully, with Trump announcing during their bilateral meeting that he would give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot missile systems. The missiles, whose different versions are made by U.S. defense giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, are best in class and highly coveted but also severely limited at the moment—primarily due to Trump’s war with Iran.
Several details of Ukraine’s Patriot deal remain uncertain, chief among them when that license will fructify and when the Ukrainian defense industrial base can actually start producing the missiles (which are notoriously difficult and time-consuming to build). But Ukraine “absolutely needs Patriot systems,” Stepanenko said. “Patriot systems, right now, have been the only effective countermeasure to Russian ballistic missile strikes.”
But as this week’s developments show, Kyiv isn’t waiting around or putting all its eggs in the Trump basket. “President Trump and I have reached an important deal on licenses to produce Patriot systems. Our teams are now working to implement this truly historic political agreement. We worked toward this for a very long time,” Zelensky said in Paris on Monday.
“But we always stress one thing—the more diverse our defense is, the harder it will be for our enemies to undermine security in Europe,” he added. “I believe Europe can provide itself with enough protection against any ballistic threat.”
