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Zelenskiy goes to Washington

It will be an interesting day today, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy lands in Washington and is scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump this afternoon in back-to-back meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also in town. Both of them want weapons.

It’s been remarkable the change in the mood surrounding Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration. Zelenskiy arrived at the Ankara Nato summiton July 8 full of confidence, and rightly so as he was warmly received by Trump, who signed off on a license deal to make Patriots for Ukraine. Of course this doesn’t actually change anything on the ground in Donbas as these factories will take years to build, but still, it marked an abrupt about face for the Trump administration.

Now Zelenskiy is in the US to follow up and get something more concrete: PAC-3 Patriot interceptor missiles. The AFU is scrapping the barrel for these missiles, the only thing that can bring down Russian ballistic missiles – and Russia has been firing a lot of those – more than it can make – in the last two months as the tit-for-tat missile warescalates. The missile attacks on Kyiv and other urban targets are catching most of the headlines, but the real story is it is the ports that are being attacked – on both sides – and they have been brought to a standstill – on both sides, with all that means for the export of oil and grain.

The thing is that the US has plenty of PAC-3 left in its stockpile – some 60 full Patriot systems, which means thousands of missiles – but obviously it has used up so many, first giving the spares to Ukraine and then firing them off in large numbers during the start of the Iran war. US President Donald Trump said yesterday, “We’ve got plenty of weapons,” but a senior general said “no, we don’t”. It appears that Trump is revving up for a major assault on Iran, and will need them if he does that. As always in this stochastic war, nothing is clear as currently Oman is having another go at brokering a deal and oil prices fell again under $100 yesterday on the news.

As I have said before, the markets have no way of pricing these risks as it’s completely unpredictable, so all they can do is react to the tweets as Trump flip flops on a daily basis. Today’s meeting with Zelenskiy and Bibi will produce more of the same. Following the “you’ve got no cards” rumble in the Oval office in February everyone will be watching closely, but what you can expect from Trump is a lot of platitudes but no promises of anything concrete. The bottom line remains the same: the US is out of the war in Ukraine.

So the optics are much better, but the situation on the ground is deteriorating. Reports from the battlefield say that the fight for Kostiantynivka, a key fortress city in the Fortress Belt, is not going well. Ukraine is no longer in control of it, but AFU still has some 95 units operating there, according to DeepState. This is a classic example of what I was talking about earlier this week: that cities don’t fall in a binary way they used to. It’s a mess of partial control and bloody death-by-drone for anyone unfortunate enough to get stuck there.

Another under reported development is Russia has rolled out an increase in the use of its FAB glide bombs, very heavy bombs dropped from fighter jets that carry 10-30 times more explosives than regular drones. Ukraine needs PAC-3 to counter Russia’s ballistic missiles, but it has nothing to protect itself from glide bombs at all. It would need a fleet of some 300 F-16s to shoot down the Russian Su-35s but we didn’t give the AFU those and there is no chance of doing so. Israel has F-16s – about 220 of them, and during the early stages of the current war US F-16s joined their colleagues in the air to shoot down inbound Iranian drones and missiles. As always, it’s one rule for supporting Israel and another for Ukraine.

The switch to FAB glide bombs – and Russia has thousands of these – is another mark of the change in the nature of the war. Missiles are smart and precise. They can take out an individual target like a warehouse or factory. FAB glide bombs are dumb and just blow a lot of stuff up and now they are being used on Odesa for the first time. Previously Putin was using missiles in a selective way as a political tool to threaten Zelenskiy with the destruction of the ports, but at the same time largely leaving the port intact, in the hope of forcing a capitulation. It’s part of the coercion strategy both sides are using to “increase the pressure.” But now Russia has switched to glide bombs that suggests Putin simply wants to destroy as much of Odesa’s port as he can as the strategy hardens and Russia builds up to “total war.” That’s what the Russians think. I was talking to friends in Moscow yesterday and the mood there is grim. People are talking about moving the dacha for the summer or leaving the country completely. There is a lot of talk over kitchen tables of a possible nuclear strike on Kyiv, although it has also been reported that Beijing has made it very clear it would not tolerate that, making it highly unlikely. If China withdrew its support for Russia, its war effort would immediately collapse.

It seems that Zelenskiy’s punishment strategy of taking the war into the homes of regular Russians is working as people are very nervous. I wrote up a very interesting commentary yesterday by famous political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya, who argued that Russia is at a crossroads and the rising tensions are threatening to rip the country apart.

I tremble at the thought of Putin trying to call a general mobilisation this autumn, as it seems to me that would finally cause the riots that have so long been predicted. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch turned dissident, was saying today that the partial mobilisation in September 2022 has never actually stopped, as the law was never deactivated and has continued in a low watt mode ever since; “soft paws” as the Russians say.

All-in-all it seems we are rushing towards some sort of crescendo when the summer is over. The head of Ukrainian missile maker Fire Point says they are testing new missiles and hope to be making three a month soon: “As many as Russia makes.” To his enormous credit it does seem that Zelenskiy has made enormous progress in closing the defence sector production gap with Russia and if it reaches anything close to parity that would be a complete game changer. The proof of the pudding will be seen when the mercury starts to fall this winter.

This article originally appeared in Editor’s Picks, a free daily email digest of bne IntelliNews’ best stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up for free here.
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— @bneeditor Jul 28, 2026

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