WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump on Friday offered a 645-word string of incoherent non-sequiturs to explain whether he is honoring a previous commitment to let Ukraine build its own Patriot anti-missile interceptor factory to defend itself against Russian attacks.
“We have not agreed to that. We’re talking about it. But it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology. And I don’t think this would ever happen, but, you know, you give that technology, they can someday turn on you. You know, that is possible. You look at war, it’s happened a couple of times over the years, right,” Trump said, answering a reporter’s question about whether he was now reneging on his pledge from just three weeks ago.
His lengthy response included explosion noises, an attack on former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity, an exploration of whether high-tech computer chips could be copied, and an acknowledgment that the U.S. copies technologies in the same way as China, among various other topics. In his answer, he twice mentioned Tomahawks, a completely different missile that was not asked about.
At the end, even after an attempted follow-up ― the 283-word answer to which inexplicably detoured to India, Pakistan, Congo and Rwanda ― it was unclear what Trump meant.
His White House officials did not respond to requests for clarification.
Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, said they were proceeding based on the commitment made earlier this month, which was reaffirmed at the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday, and further affirmed in a phone call between Zelenskyy and Vice President JD Vance on Friday morning.
“We followed up on our recent meeting with President Trump in Washington, which was positive and productive,” Zelenskyy wrote in a social media post after the call. “As Russia’s air attacks on our country continue unabated, air defense – specifically Patriot interceptors against ballistic missiles – remains a top priority.”
Trump publicly announced at the NATO summit in Ankara, at a photo opportunity with Zelenskyy, that Ukraine would be granted a license to manufacture interceptors for its Patriot anti-missile system, which are currently scarce because so many have been used in Trump’s war against Iran.
“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool, right? This way he can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough. Make them yourself,” Trump said on July 8.
Questions about Trump’s commitment to that pledge, though, arose after his interview with the Financial Times on Thursday, during which he said the following about the Patriot license: “It’s a very extraordinary weapon, and we have to be a little bit careful of who we license to.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna, on Thursday told reporters that officials from U.S. defense contractors that make the Patriot system have already visited Ukraine and plans were proceeding. She said an interceptor factory could be up and running inside of a year, and that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is now using more ballistic missiles to target civilians in her country because those are the only weapons Ukraine has not been able to counter with its home-grown defense industry.
“We have been effective in every domain except in an anti-ballistic missile technology,” Stefanishyna said.
Trump has long admired Putin, who has been charged with war crimes for his actions against Ukraine, and at the start of the invasion praised it as “genius” and “savvy.” Since then he has blamed Putin and Zelenskyy equally for the war’s continuance and drawn a moral equivalence between Putin’s murder of civilians and Zelenskyy’s attacks against Russian oil infrastructure.
The president repeated that argument Friday at the photo opportunity before a Cabinet meeting he was hosting at Camp David, suggesting that Russia’s war of conquest is still going on because of the personal animosity between Zelenskyy and Putin.
He said, “There’s a lot of dislike, as you probably notice.”