Ukraine: emergency NATO-Ukraine Council before “Ramstein” – Kyiv asks allies to swap their Patriot missiles

Ukraine has called an emergency session of the NATO-Ukraine Council, a few days before this year’s last meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, known as the “Ramstein” format. The session, at the level of the allies’ permanent representatives and chaired by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, was made known on Thursday, November 5 by the head of Ukraine’s Permanent Mission to NATO, Alyona Getmanchuk, in a Facebook post.

The Ukrainian side put two requests on the table: to quickly find the money missing for 2026 military aid, and for allies to swap the Patriot missiles in their stores for new ones that Ukraine has already ordered.

The winter of terror has already begun

Getmanchuk described the situation in her country in harsh terms. “With Russia’s air terror it is now clear that we cannot afford to be in a ‘preparing for winter’ phase. In terms of intensity, scale and barbarity of the attacks, Ukraine is already in practice living in a winter regime of terror, and of course as temperatures fall the situation will become even harder,” she wrote.

As she explained, at the meeting the Ukrainians briefed allies on the scale and character of the Russian threats and presented the country’s needs, as well as the priorities they expect from partners, both for the immediate period and for next year. According to Getmanchuk, one big opportunity remains to mobilise all partners: to speed up new decisions and turn what they have already announced into concrete transfers of equipment or funds.

The Ankara 70 billion and the Patriot swap

A particular place in the discussion was held by the commitment NATO countries undertook at the Ankara summit: €70 billion of military support to Ukraine in 2026 and at least the same amount in 2027. With a few weeks left until the end of the year, Kyiv is pressing for the missing amount to be found faster to keep the promise.

The most concrete Ukrainian proposal concerns the Patriot system missiles. Allies are asked to give Ukraine missiles from their own stocks and take in their place the new ones for which Kyiv has already signed contracts and which it expects to receive next year or later. Getmanchuk says the Ukrainian delegation explained to allies how the swap would work and why it benefits NATO countries themselves. The speed with which partners answer in the coming weeks will decide, she stressed, whether Ukraine withstands the Russian attacks this winter and strengthens its defence in 2027. See also our report on Zelensky’s remarks on Patriot deliveries.

The next meeting of the Ramstein format will take place on Tuesday, November 17 at NATO headquarters in Brussels. It will be convened by Britain and Germany, as NATO announced.

Another €100 million from Berlin

The same day it emerged that the German government is proposing an additional €100 million for the restoration of Ukrainian water, energy and transport infrastructure. The proposal is contained in a letter from the German finance ministry to the Budget Committee of the Bundestag, seen by Reuters. The amount will be added to the funds for Ukraine already foreseen in the 2026 budget. In September Berlin had allocated another €250 million through the Ukraine Energy Support Fund.

The ministry calls the expenditure “unforeseeable”, since the intensity of the war could not be predicted when the budget was passed. The letter notes that since July Russia has been striking critical and civilian infrastructure ever more often and more fiercely in large cities, along road axes, at logistics centres and businesses, that 80% of Ukrainian electricity generation has been destroyed since the 2022 invasion, and that the October attacks left more than a third of the country’s regions without power. The money will go to decentralised power generation and storage units, to repairs of water and power networks, to firefighting equipment and to school repairs.