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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on President Trump and Congress to send more Patriot missile interceptors, warning that Russia is gearing up to intensify its strikes against Ukraine’s cities.

Getting into it: In a five-page letter written on Memorial Day and first reported by the Kyiv Independent, Zelensky stressed that Ukraine has no homegrown way to stop Russia’s ballistic missiles. “When it comes to defending against ballistic missiles, we rely almost exclusively on the United States,” he wrote, calling Patriots “the most effective defense against every type of Russian ballistic missile” and noting that in Ukrainian hands they’ve proven “the majority of Russian missiles can be stopped.” Zelensky also personally handed the letter to visiting US lawmakers, Rep. Jim Himes and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, while Ukraine’s ambassador circulated it to the White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

A central complaint in the letter is that the main pipeline for getting Ukraine those weapons isn’t working fast enough. Trump has avoided large direct aid packages in favor of the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a NATO-backed mechanism that lets allies finance purchases of US arms for Ukraine, but Zelensky warned that “the current pace of deliveries through the PURL program is no longer keeping up with the reality of the threat we face.” He said Ukraine is ready to buy as many systems as it needs and proposed expanding joint Patriot production with European partners “fully under US control,” along with new “Drone Deals” to share Ukraine’s drone technology (an industry he said now “outpaces Russia’s”).

The timing, however, runs into a major problem: the US stockpile is badly depleted from the recent war with Iran. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US burned through at least 1,060 Patriot interceptors during that conflict, and though the administration is asking for another 3,203 in fiscal 2027, those orders aren’t projected to start arriving until May 2029. CSIS figures the US is at least three years out from rebuilding its pre-war reserves, all while scrambling to supply interceptors to Ukraine and 17 other countries.

The plea was driven by a sharp escalation in Russian attacks. Zelensky pointed to a brutal weekend barrage that saw Russia fire off dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles, hypersonic rounds among them, plus a swarm of roughly 600 drones, killing at least two people, injuring nearly 100, and wrecking more than 350 homes. Moscow has since signaled another wave of mass strikes aimed at Kyiv’s “decision-making centers,” with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even urging the US to evacuate its embassy.