President Joe Biden claimed on Sunday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed that American-made F-16 fighter jets will not be used to attack Russian territory.
At the tail end of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, President Biden said that President Zelensky provided him with a “flat assurance” that Western-supplied F-16 fighter planes will not be used to attack Russia itself, but rather “wherever Russian troops are within Ukraine and the area,” the Reuters news agency reported.
While his troops were facing potential defeat in the key stronghold of Bakhmut over the weekend, with Russia claiming it had captured the city and Ukrainian defence officials denying outright defeat, Zelensky travelled to Japan to once again push Western allies to provide his country with more weapons and aid.
On this front, Zelensky was successful, with President Biden announcing that despite the ongoing feud in Washington over the debt ceiling, the American taxpayer would supply Ukraine with another $375 million in military aid, including armoured vehicles and artillery.
Perhaps more crucially was the approval from the White House for its NATO allies to supply Ukraine with American-made F-16 fighter jets, a move which President Zelensky has long lobbied for under the premise that its current fleet of MiG-29 Soviet-era planes previously supplied by Poland and Slovakia are outdated and inefficient compared to the American hardware.
President Biden also gave the go-ahead for Western allies to begin training Ukrainian fighter pilots on how to operate the F-16 jets in Europe.
While it is not clear at present which countries would be offering the training programme — which could last up to 18 months — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that the UK is planning on coordinating alongside Belgium, Denmark, and The Netherlands “to get Ukraine the combat air capability it needs.”
Earlier this week, the UK and The Netherlands announced that they plan to form a “jets coalition” to aid in the war against Russia, however, at present, neither country has openly committed to supplying jets to Ukraine. Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz continued to refuse to send F-16s to Ukraine, saying according to the Tagesschau broadcaster: “Germany does what it can do itself.”
In response to the decision from Biden to ok allies to send the jets to Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko warned that the move would escalate tensions between the West and Moscow.
“We see that Western countries are sticking to the escalation scenario. It is fraught with colossal risks for themselves,” Grushko told the state-owned TASS news agency.
It was unclear from Biden’s statement of alleged assurances from Zelensky that F-16s would not be used to attack Russian territory whether this would include the Crimean peninsula, which Russia has controlled since it illegally annexed the territory in 2014 under the Obama administration. Both Moscow and Kyiv claim rights to Crimea and therefore it is unclear whether a Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held territory would violate the terms of the agreement with Biden.
The Kremlin previously claimed that a truck explosion which partially destroyed the Kerch Strait Bridge, which connects Crimea to the Russian mainland, in October was a “terrorist” plot conducted at the behest of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry — a claim that Kyiv has denied. More recently, Russia accused Ukraine of attempting to use drones to assassinate Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin itself, a claim which Kyiv has also denied.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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