Refusals deal significant blow to Kyiv’s efforts to bolster military capability in war with Russia
Western allies appear to have retreated from supplying F-16 and other western fighter jets toover the past 24 hours, with the UK joining the US in quashing Kyiv’s hopes it could obtain the jets soon after the west agreed to send it tanks.
Ukraine responded by saying it would continue lobbying, arguing that the west had repeatedly said no to supplying weapons such as tanks before relenting over time. Oleksii Reznikov, the defence minister, said on a visit to Paris: “All types of assistance at the beginning went through the ‘no’ stage. This means ‘no’ as of today.”
Any delivery would have to “not be escalatory”, Macron said, and the jets could “not be likely to hit Russian soil but purely to aid the resistance effort”. Arms supply must also not weaken the capacity of the French armed forces, he added. Biden’s decision represents a serious knockback, at least for now, and it likely to be partly based on concerns that the Kremlin could argue that F-16s could be used to hit targets inside Russia, and so could be readily interpreted by Moscow as a significant escalation in the war.
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