Ukraine will run out of US air defence support in days – and Putin knows it

Donald Trump’s slashing of military aid to Kyiv is the beginning of America’s assault on a European ally. His decision will kill people as surely as if American B52s were dropping their munitions on Ukraine’s cities.

It also marks the start of Trump’s operation against President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The pause on American military aid will boost morale among Russian troops, who are losing men in gigantic numbers to tiny gains – and send yet another signal to the Kremlin that Trump is on Russia’s side. It will play havoc with Ukrainian planning and will weaken Ukrainian defences.

But in the next few days it will also kill civilians - unless, of course, Trump has a change of heart. It is a hope Zelensky harbours after issuing a fulsome message to Trump, expressing “regret” for their explosive clash with Trump at the White House last Friday.

Russia has been forcing Ukraine to squander its air defences with massive storms of Shahed drones, long range ballistic and some hypersonic missiles several times a week for more than two years.

Defence against these swarms ranges from soldiers in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns through to the US-designed Patriot missiles systems.

Only these Patriots can protect against Russia’s incoming long-range missiles – but Ukraine doesn’t have a stockpile. The missiles are fired within days of arriving in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin knows this.

The Russian president is now certain to order a surge in air attacks against Ukraine to use up all the available Patriots – when that has been achieved, many, many Ukrainians will die.

They will be killed working on energy plants and in hospitals, malls, railway stations and government offices. These are all locations across the vast country that have already been hit.

The Patriots protect Volodymyr Zelensky’s offices. They guard Ukraine’s handful of functioning airfields. In a few days, Russia, then, will have a strategic advantage.

Zelensky has said the US missiles would enable Ukraine to hold Russia back indefinitely. Now, it will be hard to hold Russia back at all.

It could take months – or years – for France and Italy to boost production of their jointly designed anti-missile missile system and fill the gap.

So, Russia will move fast to take advantage of the opportunity to kill Ukrainians now offered by Trump’s pause in military supplies, which means that even missiles already dispatched to Ukraine will not be delivered.

Zelensky recently asked for the US to licence the production of Patriot missiles to Ukraine and cited the example of a call he had from an air defence officer one night under attack.

“At 3, 4, and 5am the commander calls me and says: ‘We are near this city, and we have no missiles for the Patriot systems – we’ve exhausted them… There are eight [Russian] missiles incoming, but we have nothing left to intercept them.”

Trump wants Zelensky to return to Washington and agree to a minerals deal that could mortgage his country to America indefinitely and to show that he is keen on negotiating peace with Russia.

The Kremlin’s forces are not winning in Ukraine. Russia’s economy is fragile, its losses on the battlefields are huge – and it is badly isolated, internationally.

Suspending military aid to fight Putin’s forces provides the Russian president with breathing space and an offensive opportunity. He has got what he wanted – and will probably ask for more.