NATO would be wise to welcome Ukraine as a member of the alliance and should hurry to send more missiles to Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ankara Summit on Tuesday.
World leaders have arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit, including U.S. President Donald Trump who flew from Washington with both Air Force One aircraft, disembarking from the new red-white-and-blue refurbished Boeing 747-8 on Tuesday afternoon. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was one of the first world leaders to address the summit and spoke at the NATO Defence Industry Forum after his personal jet touched down, using his time at the podium to call for more missiles for Ukraine, and for NATO membership.
While membership of the alliance has been frequently discussed for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the difficulties of admitting a new member that is already at war and one-fifth occupied by Russia has so necessarily precluded any progress on the matter. Nevertheless, it is something Ukraine has persistently raised — often as leverage against other wants — and that continued on Tuesday afternoon, with a pitch to the floor from the national President that attempted to portray admitting Kyiv as a slam-dunk.
President Zelensky said:
…we have raised our interception rate against Russian Shahed drones to over 90-per-cent… and with all due respect no other country has the capability to defend against attack drones at this scale… I have a question for you. Do you really believe it would be right to leave outside NATO a country and a people with this level of defensive capability?
If we already have these capabilities, if Ukrainians already know how to fight like this, then it does make sense for these capabilities to become part of the alliance’s collective defence. That would make all of us stronger. And we already see each other as reliable partners, and it would only be natural to become part of one common security community.
While Ukraine is doing well in intercepting Russian drone strikes and cruise missiles, catching ballistic missiles — which are propelled into space before they return to earth, plummeting at enormous speed towards their targets — is an altogether different proposition. One of the most difficult jobs in defence, successfully intercepting modern ballistic missiles is a job for only a handful of sophisticated and extremely expensive specialist interceptors, and these are in short supply.
For Ukraine and most of the Western world this presently means the U.S.-made Patriot missile, a creation of the Cold War designed to protect cities from long range nuclear strikes. Given the relatively small number of Patriot missiles in the world, the slow rate at which new ones are being produced in the U.S., and the anxiety of those nations which possess Patriot batteries to not leave their own cities totally undefended, Ukraine has never been able to field as many defence systems as Russia is able to launch attacking ballistics.
Getting more missiles is the primary ambition for Ukraine in this NATO conference, with Zelensky saying to alliance leaders earlier in the week that their Patriot missile reserves are useless sitting in Western “warehouses” doing nothing, when they should be shipped to Ukraine to fight off Russia. Calling for more donations and also for Europe to wean itself off dependence on American-made Patriots by creating its own interceptor programme, Zelensky went on today:
“…he one thing we still need to do here in Europe is build a strong defence against Russia’s ballistic missiles. This is a big challenge, this is Russia’s last major advantage. And as we have seen from the wars in the Middle East and the Gulf, this is an issue of global importance. And I think Europe urgently needs its own capability to produce anti-ballistic systems and the missiles they require. We all value the Patriot system, it’s an excellent system and there are others as well but today’s wars have shown current Patriot production is not enough to meet the growing demand for protection against ballistic missiles, that’s a fact.
Those that defend life need more Patriots. We have also discussed Patriot production licenses with our American partners and I ask you to support our efforts to make this happen… Europe needs its own effective anti-ballistic system and missiles and this work is already underway… this cannot wait to 2030 or beyond, Europe needs affordable, mass-produced, anti-ballistic systems as soon as possible. In fact, today.
In his plea for donations, Zelensky said Ukraine was now capable of doing “everything else ourselves” except build ballistic missile interceptors, and asked for focus there.
On Tuesday evening after the first day of the summit, Zelensky added of NATO “as our partners say, Ukraine rightfully belongs here”. The Ukrainian leader is due to have a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday.