The withdrawal of earlier support for the delivery of aircraft to Ukraine comes after days of intense Ukrainian lobbying for such aircraft and a row between the US and Poland over how such a deal might develop. The incident marked the first significant tension within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as it provides support to Ukraine in repelling Russian forces.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke to his Polish counterpart on Wednesday and “stressed that we do not support the transfer of additional fighter jets to the Ukrainian air force at this time,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
The Pentagon move comes a day after Poland stunned Washington by announcing that it would lend its Soviet-made MiG-29 warplanes not to Ukraine, but to the US. Instead of sending planes to Ukraine, Poland suggested that they fly hundreds of miles first in the other direction, to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
This idea took Washington by surprise. “I think it’s pretty clear, you don’t need to be a military expert to understand why flying aircraft from a US airbase to a contested part of the country where there is a war is not in our interest and not in the interest of NATO.” This was announced on Wednesday by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon’s Mr. Kirby called the proposal “high risk” and said it “would not materially change the effectiveness of the Ukrainian Air Force from that of Russia.”
The spat between two close NATO allies comes as Vice President Kamala Harris heads to Poland. On the agenda is “how best to provide comprehensive security assistance to Ukraine,” said a senior administration official.
Since the Russian invasion began, NATO has largely acted in tandem, helping Ukraine fend off Russian forces, delivering weapons to a neighboring country, and sending reinforcements to the alliance’s eastern front to protect allies there. And NATO is beginning to heed long-standing requests from Poland and other Central European members to permanently deploy troops there to bolster defenses.
The issue of the planes came to light after Ukrainian officials spent weeks pleading with Western countries to supply them with weapons to counter Russia. As Russian helicopters and fighter jets have attacked Ukrainian cities, government officials have increasingly called on allies to provide equipment to destroy these aircraft.
The provision of combat aircraft for the transfer of weapons from the West to Ukraine, which was to become the most important, began as a subject of discussion at a low level among the European military. All became known when 10 days ago the head of the foreign policy department of the European Union, Josep Borrell, publicly mentioned these conversations. “We are going to supply weapons and even fighter jets,” he said on 27 February.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell spoke Tuesday in Strasbourg, France.
Photo: Frédéric Florin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Technical discussions were ongoing at the time, but they had to be cautious, according to Polish officials. Officials considered moving planes across the eastern border into Ukraine clandestinely to avoid provoking a wider war that NATO could be directly involved in.
For some, this idea has never worked out. “Turning a NATO aircraft into an aircraft that Ukrainians could fly would mean removing extremely sophisticated systems,” said a US defense industry official in Poland. Warsaw has upgraded its MiGs with systems so that allies can identify the aircraft as friendly and communicate safely, he said, noting that some of this equipment is not transferred outside the alliance and must be removed from aircraft before being handed over to the Ukrainians. .
“If there was such a plan, it would be at least a multi-month project, even running at super-fast speed,” he said.
Ukrainian pilots will likely be able to adapt to Polish aircraft relatively quickly, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be experienced enough to fly MiGs into the war, said Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal Combined Arms Institute, a London-based think tank. . “The question is, can they be combat-ready right away? Probably not,” he said, adding that it would take weeks to reach that level of skill.
Nevertheless, negotiations continued.
Ukrainian officials say a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol as conditions became desperate for civilians unable to leave the country. Photo: Yevgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
For more than a week after Mr. Borrell’s comment, Polish and American diplomats and Defense Department officials covertly researched whether and how this could be done. Publicly, the Polish government issued a carefully worded denial, saying it would not send Polish aircraft to Ukraine or allow the use of Polish airfields.
The two Polish officials said they were privately investigating whether there was some creative workaround. One of the loosely considered ideas was to transport planes by road.
NATO members Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia use the MiG-29, a type of aircraft with which Ukrainian pilots are familiar. Only Poland seriously considered transferring its MiGs.
Poland’s main concern: she didn’t want to be seen as unilaterally donating her planes, but rather wanted the US and NATO to support the move. This would protect him from retribution from his historical rival, Russia. The government hoped it could silence the negotiations.
That all changed after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made an impassioned appeal to Capitol Hill for help getting more lethal military aid, calling for Russian-made fighter jets that Ukrainian pilots could fly among other equipment. Several US lawmakers rallied around the appeal. Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), Democratic No. 2 in the Senate, among others, said the US should help make the transfer possible.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who turned to Capitol Hill for help in getting military aid, at a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine last week.
Photo: Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A day later, after meeting with Polish officials on Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the US had given the green light to the transfer of MiGs to Ukraine and was looking into ways to get replacement Polish aircraft.
Polish officials said they were stunned by Mr Blinken’s remarks, which they believe effectively left Poland with a choice between denying Ukraine the planes it wants or donating it – a gift that Moscow could consider an act of war. Ukraine’s use of airfields in other countries would be “a highly undesirable and potentially dangerous scenario,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
“Poland was supposed to cut one-third of its Air Force to please some crowd on Twitter or some American pundits,” said Slawomir Debski, director of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, a think tank. “And then the allies would blame us and say that we provoked the Third World War and dragged the alliance into a war with Russia.”
By Tuesday, Polish officials were frustrated by mixed signals about whether the idea should be discussed so openly. Warsaw was alarmed that Poland was being single-handedly pushed into a dangerous branch without US support. And she could not stand a situation where the country – one of Ukraine’s biggest champions in NATO – was portrayed as a stumbling block on the way to take off planes, a senior Polish government official said. The president’s office and representatives have gathered to fight back, the official said. Shortly thereafter, Poland made its offer by providing aircraft in exchange for used American aircraft. And they called on other NATO allies to release their own MiGs.
Ms. Psaki on Wednesday described what happened the day before as a “temporary communication failure.”
— Lawrence Norman, Tarini Party, and Katherine Lucy contributed to this article.
Ukrainians Seek Security While Russia Continues Offensive
Mass exodus from hostilities in Ukraine continued, Russian troops attacked cities and military installations
Emergency workers and volunteers on Wednesday delivered a pregnant woman injured in a Russian airstrike to a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.
Evgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
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Emergency workers and volunteers on Wednesday delivered a pregnant woman injured in a Russian airstrike to a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.
Evgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
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