French President Emmanuel Macron has said that he will not rule out sending fighter jets to Ukraine, reports have claimed.
The possibility of France shipping off fighter jets for use in Ukraine is not off the table, President Emmanuel Macron has reportedly said amid calls that Western nations hand over F-16 fighters to the country to help it fend off Russia.
Macron’s statement comes amid attempts by other western leaders in the likes of the United States and United Kingdom to resist calls to hand over any jet fighters, with U.S. President Joe Biden responding with a simple “no” when asked if he would consider handing over F-16s to the invaded nation.
However, it appears Macron is less quick to refuse Ukraine’s latest request for weapons, with French broadcaster BFMTV reporting the President as responding in a relatively positive manner towards the possibility.
“Nothing is prohibited in principle,” Macron said, though adding that any weapons sent to Ukraine would have to be requested by the country’s government, and assurances would have to be given that the weapons would “not be escalatory” and “not be likely to hit Russian soil but purely to aid the resistance effort”.
How worthwhile such criteria is towards preventing military escalation however remains to be seen, with Moscow already seemingly of the opinion that the West’s willingness to send advanced Main Battle Tanks to Ukraine makes peace talks “pointless“.
Macron’s seeming willingness to hand over jet fighters to Ukraine stands in stark contrast with the desires of his NATO allies, who — while flooding Ukraine with weapons — do wish to at least appear to not be directly fighting Russia themselves. Deploying warplanes has been broadly seen as a major escalation.
For instance, when asked whether he would be willing to transfer a number of F-16 jets to Ukraine to help it fight off Russia, U.S. President Joe Biden responded with a simple “no“.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the UK Prime Minister has dismissed the idea of sending over advanced fighter jets such as the Typhoon and the F-35 to Ukraine as being “pointless”, as it would apparently take “months” to train up Ukrainian pilots to fly them.
However, just because both nations are saying no now does not necessarily mean they will continue to do so, with the UK’s complaint that the jet fighter platforms are too high-tech for Ukrainian soldiers having previously been used to reject calls to send certain advanced tanks to Ukraine.
For instance, the U.S. Pentagon previously rejected calls to send M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks to Ukraine over claims that it was too “complicated“, though such a concern has seemingly disappeared now the country has committed to sending some of the tanks to the invaded nation.
Meanwhile, seemingly unconcerned about the escalating nature of the current conflict, officials in Ukraine have been expanding the weapon wishlists that they are handing their NATO allies, with some now demanding submarines, warships and long-range missiles be handed over from the west.
How such a desire for ever-more advanced weapons will be seen by Russia remains unknown, with some officials close to Putin now reportedly saying that they see NATO itself as being involved in the conflict between itself and Ukraine.
“The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv — this is a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain,” Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev is said to have told one Russian newspaper.
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