EU countries won’t send Ukraine fighter jets after all

 

EU countries won’t send Ukraine fighter jets after all

 

Ukrainian authorities claimed on Monday that they would be receiving planes from several EU partners.

 

BY HANS VON DER BURCHARD, JACOPO BARIGAZZI, LILI BAYER AND ZOSIA WANAT

March 1, 2022 7:58 pm

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-promise-to-supply-fighter-jets-to-ukraine-gets-grounded/

 

Poland won’t send fighter jets to Ukraine, the country said Tuesday — the latest in a series of similar denials from EU countries that have highlighted early confusion about what the bloc’s new military support for Kyiv will actually encompass.

 

In addition to Poland, the Bulgarian and Slovakian governments have also recently ruled out the delivery of military aircraft to Ukraine. Yet at the same time, a Ukrainian official was claiming as recently as Monday that Ukrainian pilots had left the country to pick up planes donated by EU countries.

 

Such conflicting remarks peppered the rocky first few days of the EU’s attempt to serve as a logistics coordinator for the delivery of military aid to Ukraine as it faces down a surging Russian invasion. In a historic move, the EU on Sunday said it would take a much more assertive role in funneling weapons and other military equipment from its members to Ukraine, even using €450 million of EU funding to help finance the effort.

 

On Monday evening, a Ukrainian official said pilots had arrived in Poland to receive military aircraft from EU partners. The planes in question were Soviet-era jets like the Mig-29, which Ukrainian pilots are already trained to fly. The Ukrainian parliament even put specifics on the donations: Europe, it tweeted, was sending 70 fighter planes in total, including 28 MiG-29s from Poland, 12 from Slovakia and 16 from Bulgaria, along with 14 Su-25s from Bulgaria.

 

Not so, the countries said.

 

Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov explained that his country had a deficit of serviceable aircraft and parts and did not have sufficient fighter jets to guard its own airspace, let alone to lend jets to Ukraine, a Bulgarian official told POLITICO. A spokesperson for the Slovakian Ministry of Defense on Tuesday also denied any donation: “Slovakia will not provide fighter jets to Ukraine,” the spokesperson said.

 

Polish President Andrzej Duda joined the chorus on Tuesday. Speaking alongside NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the Łask Air Base in Poland, Duda said his country is “not going to send any jets to the Ukrainian airspace,” arguing “that would open a military interference in the Ukrainian conflict.”

 

NATO, Duda stressed, is not a party to Russia’s war in Ukraine — a key caveat the military alliance has tried to make despite several of its members supplying the Ukrainian military with lethal arms while also hitting Moscow with crippling sanctions.

 

However, Duda’s comments were not entirely clear. He did not specify whether his denial was referring to Poland not sending jets operated by Polish pilots into Ukraine — which would indeed mean an open military interference in the war — or whether his rejection referred more broadly to any potential delivery of Polish fighter jets to Ukraine.

 

Hours later, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a more direct denial.

 

“Poland doesn’t have such plans,” he said at a press conference.

 

Talk about European fighter jet deliveries was sparked by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who went off-script during a press conference on Sunday to reference the possibility.

 

“We are going to supply … even fighter jets” to Ukraine, he said, adding that some EU countries had the “kinds of planes” that Ukraine needed to fight off Russia. Borrell even suggested such planes could be funded by EU money.

 

On Monday, however, Borrell had to publicly backtrack: At another press conference, he acknowledged that even though fighter jets were “part of the request for aid that we received from Ukraine,” the EU did not have sufficient financial means to pay for those airplanes, which would have to be donated “bilaterally” by individual EU countries instead.

 

According to EU diplomats, Borrell informally asked Bulgaria, Poland and Romania — some of the few EU countries that still use Soviet-era fighter jets — whether they could potentially deliver some airplanes to Kyiv. A Romanian official had no comment about the request or potential deliveries.

 

One EU diplomat said EU countries were “outraged” about Borrell’s public statement about the fighter jet delivery, which had not been agreed upon.

 

“Making such announcements on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced to put his nuclear deterrence force on ‘high alert’ risks to escalate the situation further,” the EU diplomat said, adding that even if countries had considered sending planes to Ukraine, those plans might have been called off after Borrell made them public.

 

The frustration and mixed messaging were perhaps a predictable side-effect of the EU, by definition a peace project, trying to swiftly move into the military supply domain. Borrell elaborated about the move on Monday, saying the EU would set up an institutional framework to provide better logistical coordination for weapons deliveries from the EU to Ukraine.

 

“We have created a clearinghouse to keep track of the Ukrainian requests, in one site, and their needs and our member states’ offers, in order to ensure maximum effectiveness and coordination of our support,” he said. “And in doing so, this cell, this clearinghouse, will be working in coordination with NATO.”

 

Borrell also added that Brussels would provide military intel to Ukraine, feeding the country’s armed forces “geo-spatial” intelligence about Russia’s troop movements.

 

“We are mobilizing our satellite center, which is placed in Madrid,” Borrell told reporters.