Yahoo News: Ukraine will receive Western fighters
The open transfer of MiG-29 fighters to Kyiv by the governments of Poland and Slovakia is the crossing of another “red line” and a step towards the supply of more modern Western combat aircraft.
Yahoo News portal columnists Michael Weiss and James Rushton wrote about this on March 21, PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
NATO members Poland and Slovakia announced last week that they would jointly donate all of their Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine. Although these are not the F-16s that are waiting in Kyiv, the move is another milestone in the West's willingness to increase military assistance to the war-ravaged country, Yahoo News authors write in the article "Why Ukraine is Finally Getting New Fighters from NATO."
They note that Kyiv could have received Polish MiGs back in the spring of last year, when Warsaw offered to transfer the planes to Washington, which would officially supply them to Kyiv. Such an agreement would allow the Polish government to declare that technically they themselves are not supplying aircraft to Kyiv, but are giving them in exchange for American ones. However, the United States did not agree to this then.
But “spare parts” for the MiG-29 began to be supplied to Kyiv from Poland; this program started in April 2022. John Kirby, then a Pentagon press secretary, confirmed that such deliveries allowed the Ukrainian Air Force to return about 20 previously inoperable aircraft back to the skies. At the same time, Yahoo News notes that Ukrainian MiGs, like those expected from Poland and Slovakia, have been converted to use HARM anti-radar missiles and modern Western bombs, including guided ones.
The portal notes that it is impossible to say exactly how many MiG-29 fighters Kyiv will receive from Warsaw and Bratislava. The authorities of Slovakia reported the delivery of 13 aircraft (although initially it was about 10), Poland – four immediately, and an unspecified number later. At the same time, the material provides an assessment by the British International Institute for Strategic Studies, whose experts believe that Poland currently has 28 MiG-29s of varying degrees of combat readiness.
“We, as the West, have two red lines: we do not want Ukraine to attack Russian territory, and we do not want a direct clash between the Russian army and the armies of NATO member countries. Anything below that threshold is fair game,” Radoslaw Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister, told Yahoo News.
His colleague, director of the Polish Institute of International Relations Slawomir Dembski, believes that “the “red lines” independently established by the West are being crossed one after another.”
“The open transfer of fighter jets to Kyiv by NATO countries will break the diplomatic impasse and will finally allow Ukraine to supply more advanced Western models of combat aircraft,” summarize the authors of the Yahoo News portal.
Как reported “PolitNavigator”, Slovakia “found” 3 MiG-29 fighters for Kyiv in two weeks.
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