Mitsubishi is the only licensed non-US manufacturer of the advanced PAC-3 interceptor, and Zelenskyy pointed to it as a model for building Ukraine's own production capacity, speaking to journalists on 9 July. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine wants to work with Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. He also said the company demonstrates a very high level of Patriot missile production and called it perhaps the strongest example today of how a country can establish its own anti-ballistic missile production after obtaining a US license. Ukraine would like to see similar production capabilities developed domestically.
When Tokyo shipped PAC-3 interceptors to the United States in November 2025, it did so on the explicit condition that they stay under US control and never reach a third country—which is why Ukraine received not a single Japanese-made interceptor from that transfer, only the US stocks it backfilled.
What Mitsubishi makes—and why Ukraine wants it
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries produces roughly 30 PAC-3 interceptors a year under license from Lockheed Martin, with the capacity to roughly double that once its main constraint—Boeing-built seekers, still in short supply—eases.
Boeing began expanding seeker production in 2023, with results expected from 2027. Japan's leverage in the Patriot supply chain runs deeper than assembly: it is the only producer of the guidance gyroscopes fitted in PAC-2 missiles—a component the US lost the ability to make domestically and had to request from Tokyo, which approved the export on 17 July 2014.
Ukraine's interest is less about buying interceptors than about copying a template: how a non-US country took an American technology license, built a domestic manufacturing base, and became an exporter of one of the most sought-after air-defense interceptors in the world.
The license alone won't do it
Only the US, Germany, and Japan hold the rights to produce the Patriot. Germany co-produces the PAC-2 GEM-T—a variant with limited ballistic missile defense capability—with Raytheon, but cannot independently manufacture or export the system. Japan produces under strict controls. Trump's promised license would make Ukraine the fourth government in that circle—but without a partner that has already solved the seeker, gyroscope, and scaling problems, a license on its own would take years to become missiles.
Zelenskyy's Mitsubishi comment makes the sequencing explicit: license first, then a partner who knows how to use it.
"But this depends on the desire of the Japanese side," he said — an acknowledgment that the partnership is aspirational, not agreed.
Japan loosened its arms rules—but not the part that blocks Ukraine
Japan's Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae's cabinet revised the Three Principles on 21 April, scrapping the rule that had confined finished exports to five non-lethal categories and permitting the export of lethal weapons in principle—a historic break with Japan's postwar pacifism.
But the revision did not remove the obstacle that matters for Ukraine. It kept the prohibition on transfers to countries in active conflict, allowing them only in narrow "exceptional circumstances." And it permits lethal exports to the 17 countries with which Japan holds Equipment and Technology Transfer Agreements—Australia, Germany, Sweden, the US, and 13 others.
