A Patriot air defence system unit placed at the Sliač airbase in central Slovakia, 10 May 2022. Photo: EPA/MARTIN DIVISEK

US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Washington would provide Kyiv with additional Patriot air defence systems amid his growing frustration with Vladimir Putin.

“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need, because Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, outside Washington. “He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening”.

“So, there’s a little bit of a problem there. I don’t like it,” Trump said of Russia’s continued aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities in defiance of US calls for a ceasefire.

The US would also send other pieces of “very sophisticated” military equipment to Ukraine through NATO, with European countries to pay “100% for them”, Trump added.

On Thursday, Washington partially resumed arms and munition shipments to Kyiv, just days after the Trump administration suspended the supply of key weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Later that day, Trump said in an interview with NBC News that he was “disappointed” with Russia and that he planned to make a “major statement” on the war in Ukraine on Monday during a visit to Washington by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump would announce an “aggressive” plan to arm Ukraine on Monday, which would include supplying Kyiv with offensive weapons in a significant shift of the Trump administration’s policy on the conflict.

According to two unnamed diplomatic sources, among those weapons would be “long-range missiles that could reach targets deep inside Russian territory, including Moscow”, Axios said.

Russia has escalated its aerial attacks on Ukraine in recent months, killing and injuring more Ukrainian civilians in June than in any other month since the initial period of its full-scale invasion in spring 2022, according to a UN report.

Following one of Russia’s deadliest attacks on Kyiv of the war so far on 17 June, in which 28 people were killed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said large-scale Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities had become increasingly common since Trump took office in January, with Moscow emboldened to “ramp up” its attacks as it faced “no new consequences” from the West.

According to Axios, Trump has become increasingly exasperated with Putin amid those continued attacks and Russia’s resistance to a US-brokered ceasefire, with a call with the Russian leader earlier this month — in which Putin insisted Russia would “not give up on its goals” in the war — reportedly convincing the US president to arm Ukraine.