Three and a half years into the war in Ukraine, the Russian military industry’s capacity is making the difference.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has recently stated that Moscow is producing in three months, multiple times the amount of ammunition that all of the Atlantic alliance nations combined.
The same goes for more advanced systems, with Russians now capable of producing and deploying hundreds of long-range drones and dozens of missiles daily.
That creates an enormous need for air defense systems, most specifically the Patriots.
But these systems and air defense missiles are very expensive and rare. Just for an example, the batch of military help for Ukraine that was stopped reportedly contained 8,500 155-mm artillery shells, more than 250 GMLRS missiles and 142 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles – but only 30 Patriot missiles.
Slavyangrad reported a few days ago:
“The night raid on Ukraine from July 8 to 9, during which about 300 drones of various types and several dozen missiles of different classes were used, was a telling demonstration of how scaling and competent combination of weapons form a new quality of strike operations.
The main point of these attacks is not individual hits, but the fact that Ukraine’s air defense structure is under systemic stress that it is unable to cope with. As practice has shown, such a volume of targets cannot be intercepted in full: detection, guidance, and interception channels are overloaded at all levels.”
The war of attrition tactic is to burn out Ukrainian resources, forcing them to overexert themselves.
“Ukraine’s air defense will not be able to cover key directions even in the deep rear, including Dnepropetrovsk, Kropivnitskiy, Lvov, Poltava, Khmelnytskiy, and Lutsk. There are problems with this now, but with the scaling of drone use, it will become impossible to resolve this issue.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Malaysia for the ASEAN summit, where he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
He was asked yesterday (10) about the delivery of Patriot systems and missiles to Ukraine – and he had sobering words about it:
The U.S. is holding back on giving Patriots to Ukraine — they want a European country to hand over theirs instead.
Rubio stressed that the Patriot system won’t save Ukraine from Russian drones:
“There are certain things Ukraine needs, like Patriot batteries. They are available.… pic.twitter.com/K1xr7U676u
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) July 10, 2025
“There are certain things Ukraine needs, like Patriot batteries. They are available. There are several countries in Europe that have them and could share with Ukraine. We’re actively working on this, negotiating with those countries.
– Any specific countries?
Well, the Spanish have one. They’re quite far from Ukraine, but they do have a battery. The Germans have one. There are others as well. I’m not singling them out — just noting those are two I know about. There are also countries that have ordered Patriot systems and are about to receive delivery. It would be great if one of them agreed to delay theirs and send it to Ukraine instead. We’re exploring creative ways to get Ukraine the defensive weapons it needs.
That said, this won’t help with drone attacks — those require entirely different tools to shoot down. But it could help against some of the missile strikes we’re seeing now.”
Read more:
The post As Hundreds of ‘Geraniums’ Pound Kiev Nightly, US Secretary Rubio Alerts: A Few Patriot Systems and Missiles ‘Won’t Stop the Russian Drones, but Only Some Missiles’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
