US approves $2.1 billion sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 missiles to Ukraine, paid for by Europe and Canada

The United States has approved the sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles to Ukraine for $2.1 billion (about Rs 581 billion), the State Department said on Friday, the BBC reported. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the missiles but warned that deliveries could take "several years".

Who pays

The State Department said the missiles would be "funded entirely" by Ukraine's allies. In its words, "Ukraine will pay for this purchase with donations from Canada, Germany, and Norway via the JUMPSTART program and national funds, financed by the European Union's Ukraine Support Loan". The main contractor is Lockheed Martin, and "no US funds are involved in this sale", the statement said.

At Friday's interbank rate of about Rs 276.75 to the dollar, the deal is worth roughly Rs 581 billion, or about Rs 1.16 billion a missile. You can run your own conversions with our currency converter.

Why Patriots matter to Ukraine

The Patriot is the only system in Ukraine's arsenal that can reliably shoot down Russia's ballistic missiles, and Zelensky has repeatedly asked Washington to speed up deliveries. The PAC-3 version is a hit-to-kill interceptor that destroys an incoming missile by direct impact.

The politics behind it

The approval follows a rough month between Kyiv and Washington. Earlier in October the US eased sanctions on Russia as part of a deal to secure Russian diesel, and President Donald Trump said it was time for Ukraine to get a new leader who could strike a deal to end the war, the BBC said. Tensions eased after Zelensky met US envoys in Oslo on 20 October.

On the same day, European diplomats at the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Atlanta, hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, refused to stand for the official photograph in protest at the presence of Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after seizing Crimea and parts of the Donbas earlier.

Why it matters here

For Pakistan the war matters mainly through prices: it feeds into global wheat, fertiliser and fuel markets at a time when the Gulf is also tense. Track the knock-on effect on pump prices in our daily petrol and diesel price page.