UK ready to help Poland replace MiG fighter jets donated to Ukraine

The UK is ready to help Poland fill the gaps created by Warsaw’s decision to donate MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, which was announced last week by President Andrzej Duda.

“We will look very positively at a Polish request to fill in the gaps that have arisen,” Britain’s armed forces minister, James Heappey, told German newspaper Die Welt. He added, however, that Poland has not yet issued such a request, notes the Polish Rzeczpospolita daily.

Last Thursday, Duda made the surprise announcement that Poland would be handing over four of its MiGs to Ukraine “in the coming days”, followed later by further aircraft. Previously, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, had indicated the transfer would happen within “four to six weeks”.

The move – which would make Poland the first NATO country to give Ukraine fighter jets – was welcomed by Kyiv and also some other eastern members of the alliance.

“[We] welcome the decision of Polish President Andrzej Duda to send fighter jets to Ukraine,” said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda. “It’s a major development that will significantly boost Ukraine’s fight against the aggressor. True leadership brings Ukraine’s victory and peace in Europe closer.”

The following day, Slovakia also announced that it would donate 13 of its MiG-29s to Ukraine.

Western countries have been more reluctant to accede to Ukraine’s calls to supply fighter jets. Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, said last month that the UK had no plans to send any of its RAF Typhoons to Kyiv “in the short term”.

He noted that, unlike with MiGs, Ukraine’s military are not trained in using Typhoons and that any rapid deployment of them would require hundreds of British ground crew to relocate to Ukraine.

However, Wallace did declare that the UK was “willing to help support other countries who might be able to offer their capabilities; we could help backfill for example, in a range of things they might be required to do”.

In response to last week’s announcement by Duda, the spokesman for Joe Biden’s National Security Council, John Kirby, said that the US “respects the sovereign decision” made by Poland. But he added that it “doesn’t change our calculus with regard to the F-16″ jets requested by Ukraine, which are ” not on the table right now”.

Die Welt reported yesterday that Germany was taken by surprise by Poland and Slovakia’s announcements that they would imminently be handing over MiGs to Ukraine.

“The USA may have been in the know, but the [German] federal government was not even informed by Warsaw,” wrote the newspaper’s Warsaw correspondent. “Eastern European partners are decoupling themselves from western Europe.”

He noted that, because Poland’s MiGs originally came from Germany, Berlin may in theory be required to provide approval for re-export to Ukraine – a similar situation as with Poland’s decision to donate German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine.

Main image credit: Julian Herzog/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.