Recent claims by senior US officials led by President Donald Trump that munitions shortages faced by American troops fighting against Iran are Ukraine’s fault are false, a Kyiv Post fact check of those statements found.
Starting in March, following massive expenditures of US air defense munitions against unexpectedly aggressive and large-scale Iranian missile and drone attacks in the Gulf, Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt all have blamed Ukraine.
- On March 3, in a Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time, and our Country’s money, GIVING everything to P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!) of Ukraine – Hundreds of Billions of Dollars worth – And, while he gave so much of the super high end away (FREE!), he didn’t bother to replace it.”
Trump went on to assert that US stocks of munitions were at the “highest end” or “virtually unlimited” but still not fully to his satisfaction.
On March 19, 2026, during an Oval Office meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Trump doubled down, saying in part: “We want to have vast amounts of ammunition, which we have right now – we have a lot of ammunition, but it was taken down by giving so much to Ukraine.”
He added that the funding request was for “a lot of reasons, beyond even what we’re talking about in Iran” and called it a “small price to pay” to stay “tippy top.”
Hegseth, on March 19 at a Pentagon press briefing, when asked about US munitions stocks available for the war against Iran answered: “We’re also still dealing with the environment that Joe Biden created, which was – which was depleting those stock holds and not sending them to our own military, but to Ukraine – which is when every time we reach back and look at any sort of a challenge we have, it goes back to well, send it to Ukraine.”
Leavitt, in comments to reporters on March 4, in response to questions on munitions and funding, said: “(A) very stupid and incompetent leader in this White House for four years who gave away many of our best weapons for nothing, for free, to another country, very far away, by the name of Ukraine.”
She went on to say the US has “more than enough” stockpiles in secret locations to handle a long war with Iran.
So what did the US really send Ukraine before Trump ended US support in February 2025?
Short version: most of it had nothing to do with air defense.
Based on data compiled from Pentagon and State Department fact sheets, blue ribbon research from Germany’s Kiel Institute and the Congressional Research Service – from 2022 and the launch of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, through 2024 and up to the takeover of power in the US by the Trump administration, the United States transferred to Ukraine $65-$69 billion worth of arms, ammunition and other military equipment.
Most of that assistance, per those records, went towards helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to fight land battles against the Russian army, in rough figures: $8 billion for artillery and munitions, $5 billion for anti-tank missiles and rockets, $10 billion for armored vehicles, $15 billion for high-tech attack weapons like the precision-guided ATACMS missile and HIMARS rocket. Another $3 billion went towards ground support equipment like Mi-17 helicopters and aviation radars, and $2-3 billion was spent on small arms and ammunition and soldier-level equipment like tactical radios and personal armor.
The air defense component of the Biden-era military aid effort to Ukraine was probably about 20% of the whole: about $10-12 billion for three Patriot interceptor batteries and munitions, 12 NASAMS batteries, a top end medium-range anti-aircraft launcher and munitions; an unspecified number of early Cold War-era HAWK air defense systems + munitions; and mix of air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles of mixed vintages including Stinger, Avenger, AIM-7/9M/Sparrow/RIM-7. Of those weapons, only one – the Patriot’s PAC-3 missile – is capable of engaging an incoming Iranian ballistic missile, although there is no guarantee it will get a hit. All of those weapons could conceivably knock down an Iranian drone, although the economics of an intercept are absurd: an American PAC-3 usually costs between $3-4 million, and an Iranian Shahed costs between $20,000-$50,000.
OK, of the air defense that the US did send to Ukraine, did that exhaust US stockpiles?
“Exhaust” is inaccurate, but “put pressure on” probably is. However, the accusation that Biden-era support to Ukraine was the main reason is highly misleading.
The number of actual missiles delivered is a military secret in both the US and Ukraine, as are the numbers of munitions held in stock.
Military analysts usually estimate that from 2022 to 2024, the United States probably transferred to Ukraine somewhere between 500 and 800 Patriot-standard missile interceptors. According to the manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, its production line manufactures about 550-650 new PAC-3 interceptors every year, not just for Ukraine but for all customers, including its main one, the US military.
According to Ukrainian Air Force counts, since invading Ukraine a second time, Russia has launched between 2,000-3,000 ballistic missiles – a weapon only the Patriot can have a reliable chance of intercepting – at Ukrainian homes and businesses. At the same time, the Russian Air Force has flown between 150,000 and 200,00 bombing and ground sorties with conventional aircraft, which Patriot is specifically designed to shoot down.
Given the giant number of missiles and air strikes Russia has launched against Ukraine, and the comparatively few interceptor missiles transferred, a continuous PAC-3 missile shortage in Ukrainian forces was effectively inevitable, and Trump’s cut off of all aid to Ukraine (aside from very limited sales at a 10% mark-up) in 2025 exacerbated it.
When the US and Israel attacked Iran and Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes, Patriot battery operators throughout the Gulf fired back. Open-source estimates of PAC-3 interceptors launched against an incoming Iranian attack usually range between 800-1,200 missiles, but in any case, roughly twice the number of interceptor missiles delivered to Ukraine over four years, expended by the US and its allies in less than a month.
Ukraine began operating Patriots in April 2023, and almost immediately, Ukrainian officials said they were worried that the pace of Russian air attacks was so intense that the PAC-3 manufacturer, Lockheed-Martin, was unlikely to be able to keep up with a production capacity of 500-600 PAC-3 missiles for all customers led by the US military.
More recently, Ukrainian military observers have noted that even a change of US national leadership – from the Democrat Joe Biden to the Republican Donald Trump – was unable to generate an increase in PAC-3 production from Lockheed Martin.
In any case, a worldwide PAC-3 shortage in March 2023 is real and obvious: one war put heavy pressure on limited production and two wars at the same time have overwhelmed Lockheed-Martin’s capacity.
The fairest assignment of blame for PAC-3 missile shortages is first the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, for without the invasion of Ukraine, it is unlikely Kyiv or Washington would have ever considered Patriot systems transfers to Ukraine.
But equally responsible, and if actual PAC-3 missile counts are the metric, then twice as responsible as Ukraine, is whomever one considers responsible for Iranian missile and drone strikes throughout the Persian Gulf – either Tehran for launching drone and missile attacks, or Israel and the US for starting a war with Iran in the first place.
The Trump administration says Ukraine is a parasite on the US. How true is that?
Philosophically, that can be true only if a nation defending itself against an unprovoked foreign invasion and facing an existential threat to its survival is a parasite for accepting help donated by a third-party country.
More practically, in the context of countering Iranian drone attacks on US assets in the Gulf region and US allies, the “parasite” sticker is patently untrue.
Ukrainian officials first suggested cooperation with the US in drone production in August 2025, with Zelensky proposing to Trump that the two countries work together in a $50-billion, five-year “drone deal” that aimed at expanding production of existing drones, developing new drone types, and technology sharing. At the time, Ukraine-developed interceptor drones – the weapon many Gulf states want badly to deal with the Iranian Shahed drones – were already in the experimental stage and being tested. That technology reached the field in fall 2025, was proven viable, and production massively up-scaled over the winter, and by February 2026, roughly every second Shahed drone launched by Russia against Ukraine was intercepted and destroyed by a Ukraine-developed interceptor drone.
Zelensky pitched the drone deal to Trump in August, but according to Zelensky, the White House wasn’t interested, which eliminated US ground floor access to Ukraine’s new interceptor drone technologies.
Following the start of the war in the Gulf and well-publicized US/Israeli/Gulf ally difficulties stopping Iran-launched Shahed drones, on March 11, Zelensky reiterated the offer.
Trump, on March 13, during a phone interview on “The Brian Kilmeade Show” (Fox News Radio), in response to a question about whether Ukraine was helping the US with drone defense, said: “No, we don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.” In an NBC phone interview the next day, Trump said: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.”
By March 17, Zelensky confirmed that 201 Ukrainian drone defense specialists had already deployed to Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, where the Ukrainians’ job would be organizing anti-Shahed defenses for a US military base near Amman.
Extra credit
On March 20, 2022, on the widely-watched Fox & Friends Weekend news broadcast, Hegseth, who would later become Secretary of Defense, expressed this opinion about US military assistance to Ukraine to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian invasion:”What’s at stake is repelling an authoritarian who is basically saying ‘I want the Soviet Union back, I want Ukraine back, I want Kyiv back. And then what’s at stake is, is, making sure we don’t allow it to become an Article 5, larger, broader war than that. So, equipping and supplying Ukraine with what it needs faster than we have. And we haven’t been doing it. The Biden administration has not been doing it fast enough. So that they can further bog Putin down and push him back.”