Two former secretaries of defense disagreed on whether President Joe Biden should meet Ukraine’s latest military aid request for fighter jets.
Former Secretary Mark Esper, who served in the Trump administration, said on Wednesday that Biden should provide Ukraine with the F-16s, while former Secretary Robert Gates, who served under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, argued that Russia’s inability to establish air superiority over Ukraine “raises the question of just how important such aircraft are or would be in the fight to come.”
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Esper said the United States should provide F-16s “sooner rather than later” for offensive and defensive purposes.
“You need, first of all, to be able to clear the skies of Russian aircraft that could disrupt your attack, but secondly, you want to use strike aircraft to hit ground targets as part of your offensive,” he said on Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “So for those two reasons, it’s important that we really push the delivery of F-16s, and sooner rather than later, those systems as well will take months to deliver, train, be prepared to support, so forth and so on.”
Biden said on Monday that he wouldn’t agree to the request, which stems in part from the expected spring Russian and Ukrainian offensives, though on Tuesday he said he’ll be speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, presumably in the near future. Ukrainian officials have long asked for F-16s, though these requests reemerged last week after the U.S., Germany, and other European allies agreed to meet Kyiv’s requests for tanks, but U.S. officials have said there is no plan to provide them to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s “extraordinary success” using air defense systems to knock down missiles and drones “makes the need for F-16s moot,” Gates said on Wednesday during a Washington Post event.
“The attacks that Russians are making with their drones and their missiles are not militarily significant,” he explained. “Those attacks are aimed at terrorizing the Ukrainian people and breaking their will. I think we’ve already seen that that’s not going to happen, but they have not played a significant role in the ground war that we’re seeing and where the outcome of this war will be determined.”
The United Kingdom and Germany have also said they will not provide Ukraine with fighter jets, while French President Emmanuel Macron said, “Nothing is off limits in principle.”
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A White House spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the administration would be announcing an aid package “soon” but did not specify when or what would be included in it.
While Biden has refused to provide Ukraine with fighter jets to date, there’s optimism he will reconsider, as he has previously agreed to provide military systems that he had rejected earlier. He agreed to provide the Patriot missile defense system and the 31 M1A2 Abrams tanks in recent weeks after declining to in the weeks prior.
“What is impossible today is absolutely possible tomorrow,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told NPR. “I’m sure that’s absolutely realistic.”
