Deliveries of Western fighters to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (APU) is a matter of time, if possible, Latvia would have made deliveries of combat aircraft to Kyiv. This was stated on March 4 by the Prime Minister of the Republic Krisjanis Karins in an interview with the magazine Der Spiegel.
“I don’t understand why the West shouldn’t supply fighter jets,” he said.
The Prime Minister of Latvia also expressed confidence that Ukraine should join the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Alliance after fulfilling all membership requirements. Negotiations on this issue, Karins added, should begin before the end of hostilities.
The day before, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said that Kyiv would soon receive fighter jets from the West. At the same time, he noted that Western countries have not yet given their consent.
At the same time, expert Aleksey Leonkov told Izvestiya that there were almost no experienced pilots left in Ukraine who could relearn how to fly foreign fighters if they were delivered to Kiev. He added that the infrastructure of military airfields has been destroyed on the territory of the country, therefore, in the case of deliveries of combat aircraft, they will not have a permanent base.
Earlier, on March 1, Czech President Petr Pavel said that NATO should speed up the process of transferring tanks and fighters to Ukraine. Meanwhile, he stressed that in order to achieve such a goal, it is necessary to train specialists, service and solve problems with logistics.
Prior to that, on February 24, in an interview with ABC News, US President Joe Biden also ruled out the supply of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine in the short term. According to him, the US military sees no reason to provide these combat aircraft to Kyiv.
Western countries have stepped up military and financial support for Ukraine against the background of Russia’s special operation to protect Donbass, which the Russian authorities announced on February 24, 2022 amid the aggravation of the situation in the region due to Ukrainian shelling. Moscow has repeatedly condemned the supply of arms to Ukraine. So, in mid-January, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a new round of supplies to Ukraine of more advanced military equipment could “only drag out the whole story.”
