Inside Ukraine’s effort to produce more of its own weapons to fight Putin as Trump’s support flip-flops
On Tuesday, Donald Trump gave Vladimir Putin a new deadline – agree to a ceasefire in the Ukraine war or face fresh sanctions.
It appeared the US president had finally run out of patience with the Russian leader, declaring he was “no longer interested in talks” and cutting a previous deadline of 50 days dramatically short.
But regardless of how encouraging this apparent renewed sense of urgency might be to Ukraine, Mr Trump’s views on the war and support for Kyiv are anything but consistent.
From the infamous Oval Office ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky to fluctuating financial commitments from the US, Kyiv has been wise to look elsewhere for reliable supplies – preferably Ukraine’s own burgeoning weapons industry.
Ukraine has made no secret that a key priority is to build its own missiles that match the destructive power and long reach of the Shahed killer drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that Moscow has been launching in recent weeks.
Russia has launched huge mass aerial attacks against the capital and cities across Ukraine including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Ivano-Frankivsk and Pavlohrad.
Pavlohrad, in Ukraine’s southeastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, recently suffered its biggest aerial attack since the start of the full-scale invasion. When The Independent drove into the city two days later, a huge plume of smoke, visible from miles away, hung over it as fires continued to rage.
It is common knowledge that Pavlohrad has been home to missile production facilities since Soviet times, and Russia’s defence ministry claimed, after the attack, it had struck facilities producing components for missiles and drones.
Dima, who works in the local coal miners’ union communications department, lives in the industrial area of the city that took the brunt of the attack.
“We experience explosions from Russian rockets and drones frequently,” he said. “But this attack was the biggest and seemed to go on forever. The Russians have increased their aerial attacks and the targets are civilian more often than military to try to cause terror.”
With Russia ramping up attacks regardless of any deadline Mr Trump attempts to impose, Kyiv has been looking at new ways to hit back.
Ukraine has shown its advanced drones can destroy targets deep inside Russian territory, more than 1,000km from the Ukrainian border.
And it is already producing and using a family of missile systems named “Neptune”, “Palyanytsia,” “Peklo,” and “Ruta”. According to Kyiv, production multiplied eight times between 2023 and 2024 with even more growth planned for this year. Mr Zelensky has said Ukraine intends to produce 3,000 cruise and drone missiles in 2025.
The homegrown R-360 Neptune cruise missile, with a 150kg warhead has been modified, according to Mr Zelensky, to give it an improved range. However, Neptunes and Ukraine’s other missiles have explosive payloads that are only a fraction – sometimes a tenth – of those carried by Russian rockets.
