BBC Today: Ukraine's shortage of ballistic missile interceptors
21 August 2026
Featured in BBC Today programme
Russia and Ukraine
The global stockpiles of those missiles that can intercept Russian ballistic missiles have largely been expended in Ukraine and Middle East and production is insufficient to meet demand, so this is a failure of defence planning. If we recall the arguments about defence spending we have been having in the UK recently, this is the consequence of not really investing sufficiently in defence against what is actually quite a predictable threat."

