Zelenskyy Tells Face the Nation the U.S. Drone Deal Still Needs One Thing: Trump to Say Yes

The framework drone agreement that Ukraine has been pushing Washington to sign for nearly a year is still unsigned, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a national U.S. broadcast to say exactly what is holding it up. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation that aired Sunday, the Ukrainian president said his country and the United States have already worked out how American forces would test, train with, and operate Ukrainian systems in the air, on land, and at sea. What does not yet exist is the document itself: a bilateral Drone Deal, the big framework agreement that turns ad hoc cooperation into a binding arrangement.

I have been tracking this specific deal since Zelenskyy first put it in front of the White House in August 2025, and the pattern has not changed across four years of war reporting: Ukraine offers the hardware and the combat data, the U.S. takes the meetings, and the signature never comes. Zelenskyy’s closing line in the interview was about as direct as a head of state gets. After listing the deals Ukraine already has with Gulf states and the bloc-wide agreement it is now preparing with the EU, he said the cooperation with America could be the most powerful of its kind in the world. Then: “we need President Trump to say yes.”

The interview was taped May 29 and broadcast May 31.

Zelenskyy Confirms Testing Is Settled While the Framework Stalls

The operational pieces of a U.S.-Ukraine drone arrangement are further along than the missing signature suggests. In his Face the Nation interview, Zelenskyy said the two governments have agreed on how the U.S. wants to test every category of Ukrainian drone and how American personnel would train with and deploy those systems across all three domains. That is the part that usually takes the longest to negotiate, and it is done.

What remains is the framework document that would govern the whole relationship. Zelenskyy drew a sharp contrast with Ukraine’s other partners. Kyiv has signed Drone Deals with several Middle Eastern and European countries, and Zelenskyy said it is now preparing a large agreement with the European Union. He said he hopes to reach the same kind of agreement with American partners, adding, “I count on it.”

His framing of why the two sides need each other has stayed consistent. American companies, he said, have advanced AI technologies Ukraine lacks. Ukraine, in turn, has things the U.S. does not, earned through what he called extensive experience on the battlefield. The math of that trade is the entire argument: the U.S. brings autonomy and machine-vision software, Ukraine brings four years of iterating drone designs under live fire against Iranian-designed Shaheds and Russian Gerans.

The Memorandum Already Exists, Approved by State and Ambassador Stefanishyna

A first-step document is already on paper, which makes the missing framework agreement more conspicuous, not less. In May, CBS News reported that the U.S. State Department and Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Olha Stefanishyna had drafted a memorandum outlining the terms of a potential defense agreement. That document would let Ukraine export military technology to the U.S. and manufacture drones in joint ventures with American companies.

Some of that is already happening below the framework level. In March, General Cherry, one of Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturers, signed a deal to build unmanned aerial vehicles in the United States alongside American military manufacturer Wilcox Industries. The Pentagon has also invited Ukrainian firms into its Drone Dominance initiative, a $1.1 billion program aimed at identifying drones for U.S. military contracts. The companies are moving. The two governments are not, at least not at the level of a signed framework.

The numbers behind the cooperation explain why both sides keep circling it. Ukraine’s National Security Council projects $55 billion in defense production capacity for 2026, but Kyiv only has funds to buy roughly $15 billion of weapons this year. American financing closes that gap. On the production side, one Ukrainian manufacturer plans to build more than 3 million low-cost first-person-view military drones in 2026. The U.S. built around 300,000 in all of 2025. That is the capability gap a deal would address, and it is the reason this story has not gone away despite a year of delay.

Trump’s Public Position Has Been the Roadblock

The obstacle Zelenskyy described in such polite terms has a documented history of blunt public rejection. In early March, Trump told Fox News, “We don’t need their help in drone defense,” adding that the U.S. knows more about drones than anybody and has the best drones in the world. Ukrainian officials told CBS News they sensed a “lack of buy-in” on a drone deal from senior figures in the Department of Defense and the White House, particularly after the war in Iran began.

That public posture sits awkwardly next to what was happening on the ground. As we reported in March, Zelenskyy confirmed the U.S. had formally asked Ukraine for help defending against Shahed drones in the Middle East, the same week a Fox News segment aired Ukrainian interceptor footage while presenting it as American technology. Ukraine had the expertise the U.S. was publicly dismissing and privately requesting.

There is also a Ukrainian-side condition that has not disappeared. Zelenskyy has said Kyiv will only relax its broad military export restrictions once it can be sure Ukrainian companies’ intellectual property is protected and that domestic supply for Ukraine’s own defense will not be undercut. The memorandum drafted with Washington suggests those concerns may be easing, but they were real, and they were never only about a Trump signature.

Ukraine Already Intercepts Russian Drones Bound for NATO Members

The same interview surfaced a second drone story that gets less attention than the deal: Ukraine is already acting as a forward shield for NATO’s eastern flank. Zelenskyy told CBS that Ukraine tries to catch every Russian drone, including ones heading toward Romania, Moldova, Poland, or the Baltic states, and notifies partners when it cannot. That is air defense Ukraine is performing for the alliance, unpaid and unframed by any treaty.

Zelenskyy traced the pattern back through the war. Russia tested the approach in Romania early on, he said, then later over Poland, where he put the count at 21 drones. The documented September 2025 incursion that forced Poland to invoke NATO’s Article 4 involved roughly 19 drones, the figure Warsaw, Bloomberg, and NATO have used since. Either way, the Ukrainian president’s read is that these are not strays. He has argued before, as we reported when NATO launched its Eastern Sentry operation, that Russian flight routes are calculated and the incursions deliberate.

His explanation for why Putin keeps doing it is the part worth sitting with. Zelenskyy described the incursions as political pressure on NATO, a message not to help Ukraine, paired with a practical test of whether bordering NATO states can actually intercept the missiles and drones aimed at them. The honest answer, on the September record, is that they struggled. NATO downed only a handful of the drones that crossed into Poland. That gap is the same one Ukraine’s $1,000-to-$2,500 interceptors were built to close, and it is the capability Kyiv is offering both Washington and Brussels.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the same deal I covered when Zelenskyy raised it at the UK Parliament on March 17 and again when he brought the $35 to $50 billion package back to U.S. talks on March 20. The substance has barely moved since August 2025. What keeps changing is the venue. Parliament, then Bloomberg, then a Telegram post, now Face the Nation. When a head of state takes the same unsigned proposal to four different platforms in three months, that is not a negotiation update. It is pressure applied through media because the direct channel is not producing a signature.

What is new here is the audience. The UK Parliament speech was aimed at Europe. The Bloomberg and Telegram messages were aimed at the policy world. Face the Nation, a Sunday-morning U.S. network show, is aimed at one viewer in particular, and Zelenskyy ended on his name. Reducing a stalled bilateral framework to “we need President Trump to say yes” is a deliberate move. It strips out the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the entire interagency process and lays the decision at one desk. Whether that flattery-and-pressure approach works on this administration is the open question the interview did not resolve.

One thing worth watching is concrete. Zelenskyy said he expects U.S. negotiators including Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner to travel to Kyiv, and he is hopeful that happens within two weeks. A White House official told CBS the trip has been discussed but not scheduled. If that delegation lands in Kyiv in mid-June, the drone framework is one of the items most likely to be on the table, because the testing terms are already settled and the memorandum already exists. If the trip slips again, the pattern I have watched for a year holds: Ukraine ready to sign, Washington taking the meeting, the framework still waiting. The hardware cooperation is real and accelerating regardless. The signature is the variable, and it has been the variable since the beginning.

Sources: CBS News / Face the Nation, CBS News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.