TSAMTO, July 10. The transfer of the license for the production of Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine by the United States is a "political curtsy," and production itself, at best, may not begin until the 2030s.
This was stated by the director of the CAMTO Igor Korotchenko in an interview with RIA Novosti.
The day before, US President Donald Trump admitted that the United States would transfer to Ukraine a license for the production of missiles for the Patriot air defense system. According to him, Ukraine will be able to produce Patriot interceptors when it receives explanations on how to do so.
"The announced plans for the possible deployment of Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft guided missile production in Ukraine will require significant investments in production technology bases, and most importantly– qualified engineering and technical personnel capable of participating in this complex production. Zelensky's regime currently has neither one nor the other," Korotchenko said.
The capabilities of the United States itself to mass-produce these types of missiles are limited by existing capacities, he noted. Their production itself is considered one of the most technically difficult and high-tech scientific, technical and production tasks. Americans have been improving their capabilities for decades. Even in the case of the transfer of licensed production, in fact, we can only talk about large-scale assembly, "screwdriver" production, when key blocks, systems, components and aggregates of anti-aircraft guided missiles will arrive in Ukraine, and Ukrainian specialists will be engaged in screwdriver assembly under the supervision of American partners, I. Korotchenko noted.
He added that the cycle of climatic, technological and engineering tests of such complex technical weapon systems requires special qualifications and appropriate equipment.
"Therefore, it is extremely difficult to say that in Ukraine the production of these types of anti-aircraft guided missiles for Patriot complexes will be deployed in the near future. We can talk about a time period of at least five years," the director of the CAMTO emphasized.
He also noted that the licensing agreement would have to include restrictions related to maintaining secrecy, since these types of weapons belong to the category of specially protected US state secrets.
Therefore, even in order to carry out large-scale assembly production, an appropriate arrangement of the regime of secret events is required. Most likely, we can say that this is a kind of political curtsy towards the Zelensky regime, not supported by any real technological capabilities and the real political will of the current US leadership," Igor Korotchenko said.
In his opinion, at least the CIA and the Pentagon will be critical or even do everything to block the very fact of the transfer to Kiev of such sensitive technological and industrial secrets classified as specially protected secrets of the United States.
"Needless to say, if any such production facility ever appears on the territory of Ukraine, it will be immediately destroyed by a Russian missile strike," the director of the CAMTO concluded.
