Polish President Andrzej Duda has admitted to delays in transferring fighter planes to Ukraine.
Some MIG-29 aircraft promised to Kyiv are participating in NATO missions are so are not yet available to be transferred. As for F-16s, Poland has too few to be able to supply any to Ukraine, the President said.
President Duda briefed reporters during his visit to Reykjavik to attend the summit of the heads of state of Council of Europe. Poland was committed to transferring all aircraft as promised, Duda said, while admitting there would be delays. Kyiv is not asking “where’s our planes, Duda”, he clarified.
Poland’s fleet of F-16 fighter jets is “not sufficiently large” to allow for them to be transferred to Ukraine, reporters were told. “The number of F-16 jets that we possess does not permit the transfer of any of them to Ukraine. We have a relatively tiny number of F-16 jets, but we are ready to support the training of Ukrainian pilots,” he said when asked whether Poland would join the international coalition to provide F-16s to Ukraine.
Poland will be training of Ukrainian pilots.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte have pledged to build an “international coalition” to provide fighter jet support for Ukraine.
Duda said Poland was “in the absolute vanguard of states” supporting Ukraine militarily with only the US and Britain doing more.“Poland has transferred an unprecedented amount of weapons to Ukraine, compared with other European Union countries,” he said. “We have supplied Ukraine with over 300 tanks and almost all of our MIG-29 fighter jets, for which Ukraine had been asking us from the very start of the conflict.”
Out of the 575 tanks supplied to Ukraine by western allies, 325 were provided by Poland, according to Warsaw’s diplomatic mission to Brussels. Poland has also supplied 14 MIG-29s out of the 28 planes supplied by NATO states so far.
