Last night, Warsaw claimed that it is’ready to send’ its MiG-29 fighter jets to the US Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they will be delivered to Ukrainian pilots to combat the Russian invasion.
However, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby expressed concern that jets would leave a US and Nato station “to fly into territory contested with Russia in the Ukraine war.”
‘We will continue to discuss with Poland and our other NATO members about this matter and the enormous logistical challenges it poses,’ he said, adding that “we do not feel Poland’s plan is tenable.”
‘It’s just not clear to us that there’s a substantive justification for it.’
Any decision to provide the MiGs would be a morale booster for Ukraine as Russian attacks on its cities deepen the humanitarian catastrophe.
President Zelensky has been pleading for more warplanes and Washington has been looking at a proposal under which Poland would supply the planes in return for American F-16s to make up for their loss.
Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly on the Soviet-era fighter jets.
Ukraine has been pleading for more warplanes as it faces heavy shelling attacks (Picture: EPA)
The US has been negotiating a deal with Poland around the jets for the past week, but is treading carefully to avoid Russia viewing it as Nato provoking a wider war.
The Polish Foreign Ministry announced the plan in a statement last night which said the jets would be delivered to Ramstein free of charge.
‘At the same time, Poland requests the United States to provide us with used aircraft with corresponding operational capabilities,’ it said.
The Polish government also appealed to other owners of MiG-29 jets to follow suit. Former Soviet-bloc Nato members Bulgaria and Slovakia also still have Soviet-made fighter jets in their air forces.
The statement appeared to catch a top US State Department official off guard.
‘I saw that announcement by the government of Poland as I was literally driving here today. To my knowledge, it wasn’t pre-consulted with us that they planned to give these planes to us,’ Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of State for political affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.
‘But as you know, we have been having consultations with them for a couple of days now about this request from the Ukrainians to receive their aircraft and were they to donate them, whether we would be able to help support backfill in their own security needs.’
Nuland said she was in a meeting where she ought to have heard about the announcement, ‘so I think that actually was a surprise move by the Poles’.
Poland’s decision to publicly float its plan came the day before Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to depart for Warsaw for talks with Polish officials.
The disconnect is likely to cast an awkward layer to the talks, which were expected to focus largely on US efforts to help Poland and other eastern European nations that have taken in some two million refugees since the war started less than two weeks ago.
The handover of Poland’s 28 Soviet-made MiG-29s would signal Western resolve to do more to deter Russia, though militarily it would be unlikely to be a game-changer as the number of aircraft is relatively small.
The MiG-29s are also inferior to more sophisticated Russian aircraft and could be easy prey for Russian pilots and Russian missiles.
Any transfer of the jets would be fraught with complications as neither Nato nor the European Union want to be seen as directly involved in the transaction, which will significantly raise already extreme tensions with Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Saturday that any nation that tries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as the sovereign country has called for, would be ‘participating in the armed conflict’.
The next day, the Russian ministry of defense warned Nato members against allowing Ukrainian air force planes to use their bases as a safe haven.
‘Subsequent use against the Russian armed forces can be regarded as the involvement of these states in an armed conflict,’ stated the Russian ministry of defense.
Moscow has also warned that supporting Ukraine’s air force would be seen by the Kremlin as participating in the conflict and open up suppliers to possible retaliation.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said the US was working with Poland to supply the MIG-29s to Ukraine and to ‘backfill anything that they provide to the Ukrainians’.
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