Trump says Ukraine war has depleted US weapons stockpile, but as Iran takes over, Kiev sees opportunity

Kyiv – The White House wants Congress to provide at least $200 billion more in funding for the war in Iran, and President Trump says this is due in part to aid for Ukraine, as the U.S. arms stockpile is depleted as it fears Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion.

“This is a very volatile world,” Mr Trump said on Thursday. “We want the huge amount of ammunition that we have right now – we have a lot of ammunition, but after giving so much to Ukraine, it was taken away.”

During his second term, Mr Trump has criticized the Biden administration for providing weapons to Ukraine that the US defense industry cannot quickly supply.

Last summer, after reviewing reserves, the U.S. Some arms shipments to Ukraine were stopped. Those arms transfers were eventually reinstated under a new initiative in which NATO allies get a greater share of the bill, but the episode made it clear that the White House views support for the defense of Ukraine as an obstacle to ensuring that America’s own defensive stockpiles will hold up to the demands of any future conflict.

Ukraine now offers reason to reevaluate that approach.

However, Ukraine now offers reason to reevaluate that approach. As US stocks of interceptor missiles have been depleted by the war in Iran, Ukrainian officials are offering deals to help replenish them. On Saturday, Ukrainian officials met with representatives of the Trump administration to discuss the two countries’ agreement to co-produce drones and drone interceptors, among other topics.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that the deal could be worth between $35 and $50 billion. He also said that several other potential deals are underway with America’s Persian Gulf allies. Urgent need for Ukrainian drone interceptor This has become a public matter amid Iran’s continuous attacks.

But experts say the deals currently being struck go beyond immediate air defence needs in the Middle East, and they could lay the foundation for a long-term US-Ukraine defence industrial partnership.

Iran is destroying Patriot interceptor missiles much faster than Ukraine is at war

As the US begins providing weapons from its arsenal to Ukraine in 2022, concerns have emerged over the ability of the US defence industry to replace them. Most worrisome was the potential shortage of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) interceptor missiles, one of the most effective weapons for shooting down incoming ballistic missiles.

“We realised that we now have a defence industrial base that doesn’t have spare capacity for wartime needs,” Matt Tavares, a defence analyst who has served as a Pentagon adviser for several administrations, told CBS News. “Some of the equipment we gave to the Ukrainians could not be immediately returned by the defence industry.”

When President Trump returns to power in 2025, his administration promises to begin producing air defence weapons faster and be more judicious about delivering them to allies. Beginning last summer, some military shipments were redirected, including 20,000 anti-drone missiles originally destined for Ukraine, which were instead sent to the U.S. Air Force units in the Middle East.

In January, the Pentagon announced a deal with Lockheed Martin to triple production of the Patriot interceptor.

But the war in Iran has complicated the Defence Department’s weapons preservation efforts.

America’s Middle East allies burnt 800 Patriot interceptors defending Iran’s retaliatory attacks during the first week of the war alone, according to Zelensky, who noted that his country had used only 600 Patriots during its four-year war with Russia.

Experts have said that the rapid use of these expensive weapons is, at least in part, the reason the White House is asking Congress for an additional $200 billion – nearly four times the amount. 70 billion dollars military aid Awarded to Ukraine from 2022.

“To the extent that U.S. stockpiles are being depleted, it has more to do with what’s happening in the Middle East over the last nine months than what’s happened in Ukraine,” Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defence Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CBS News.

Can Ukraine offer a long-term solution to increasing the US arms stockpile?

As interceptor stockpiles are depleted due to the Iran war, the US and its Gulf allies have turned to Ukraine for drone defence expertise. President Zelensky said this last week: Ukraine sent more than 200 drone experts to the Middle East to help defend military installations and civilian centres from Iranian attacks.

In return, the Ukrainians hope to receive more Western interceptor missiles, which are vital to their own air defence. Asked by journalists in Kyiv last week whether the Iran war could further disrupt missile shipments from the US and Europe to Ukraine, Zelensky said, “The risk is very high,” and stressed that acquiring more Patriot missiles was “our priority”.

But the deals now underway between Kyiv and Washington, and Kyiv and the Gulf states, are not likely to lead to a direct arms exchange to strengthen Ukrainian or Middle Eastern air defences in the short term.

“The problem is how quickly can we actually produce Patriot interceptors? I think the Gulf, right now, wants to hold on to all their interceptor stocks because they don’t know when they’ll be replenished,” Dara Massicotte, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CBS News.

He said this could be about long-term benefits for Ukraine.

“Here’s a way where they can partner on drones, get capital investment, and then the money coming into the defence sector can be used to develop specific things like long-range strike or air defence information,” Massicotte said.

That kind of arrangement could prove equally beneficial to Kyiv politically, even if it would not help its immediate war needs.

Karako said, “This could be a moment where Ukrainians who help here get some goodwill on the part of the United States and show that they are a contributor, not just a waster of security resources.”