The United States will assist Poland as it transfers used warplanes and other advanced weaponry to Ukrainian forces, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, even vowing to replenish Warsaw’s fleet with American fighter jets.
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation over the weekend, America’s top diplomat was asked whether Washington would go through with the weapons deal, confirming that plans are in the works to transfer Polish MiGs to Kiev and replace them with US planes.
“That gets the green light. In fact, we’re talking with our Polish friends right now about what we might be able to backfill their needs if in fact they choose to provide these fighter jets to the Ukrainians,” he told host Margret Brennan. “What can we do? How can we help to make sure that they get something to backfill the planes that they’re handing over to the Ukrainians?”
.@SecBlinken: The U.S. has given the “green light” to NATO countries if they choose to provide fighter jets to Ukraine, one day after President Zelensky made a plea to members of Congress to provide them during a Saturday Zoom call. https://t.co/liDkdNCAFIpic.twitter.com/3vHqk6YzQe
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) March 6, 2022
The “green light” from Blinken is extremely risky given the current heightened tensions between the US and Russia. Last week, Moscow placed its nuclear forces on high alert in response to what it deemed “aggressive statements” from NATO powers following its invasion of Ukraine, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has described a wave of Western sanctions as tantamount to an act of war.
It’s likely that the Kremlin will view the Polish weapons shipment as an escalation, with a flood of European arms already pouring into Ukraine. The view is shared by some in the White House, who are concerned that transfers of anti-tank and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles will make Washington an active belligerent in the conflict.
However, it remains to be seen whether the statement from Blinken is purely rhetorical. Last week, the EU announced a massive shipment of warplanes to Ukraine, but member states quickly realized the move could seriously inflame tensions with Moscow and soon abandoned the plan.
Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute. Will Porter is the assistant news editor of the Libertarian Institute and a staff writer at RT. Kyle and Will host Conflicts of Interest along with Connor Freeman. Reprinted from The Libertarian Institute.
“However, it remains to be seen whether the statement from Blinken is purely rhetorical.”What the hell does that mean? “Purely rhetorical?” The rhetoric is the thing, dummy. Words from centers of power have consequences. They can easily be construed as something they are not, especially with a war going on.
Laundering fighter planes through Poland isn’t much different than giving them directly to Ukraine. Provocative. The older Polish planes will get destroyed soon, while the US planes will continue to need American spare parts. Another win-win from the U$ perspective, as long as fueling more bloodshed remains irrelevant.
Your expression “Laundering fighter planes” is an exercise in irrelevance, since Ukraine needs them no matter where they come from. They would help to spur Russia to take the negotiations in Belarus seriously after earlier agreements to allow civilians to flee the fighting collapsed.
“fueling more bloodshed” is what Putin is doing with his unwillingness to provide safe passage for refugees from besieged cities, and for his allowing indiscriminate bombing and shelling of civilian buildings.
“Provocative” is reminiscent of Stalin’s excuse for waging all-out war on Finland due to alleged “provocations” by the Finnish army along the border.
In short, your bias is showing.
Just stop this nonsense. These planes will be destroyed just like ukraines original planes were destroyed by Russia.
This war ends when (not if) Russia achieves its objectives … the sooner, the less damage to Ukraine.
“Just stop this nonsense,” you wrote. The real nonsense here is that you are behaving as though you were posting to a forum named Prowar.com. The aims of Russia take priority over the antiwar sentiments, if any, that you have.
That goes also for all 7 people who upvoted your warmongering comment.
They had it coming. If anyone knows the Russians best are the Ukrainians. They turn their backs to the Russians and show outrage when the outcome is the same. Ukraine broke one of the commandments: Honor thy neighbor. Especially the neighbor that’s much more powerful and share a longer history than the western whores they sold out to.
Harsh but true.
Pulling nukes on Russia while not actually having a nuke is particularly dense, though.
You and “Analyzer” — as well as everyone else here but myself — are ignoring the huge moral divide that marked Putin’s tremendous escalation of the conflict. Had Putin been content with occupying the Donbas and enforcing the independence of the two regions, I wouldn’t even be participating on this forum.
You are all in interesting company: Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, also acted as though the escalation had never taken place. He preached a sermon on March 6 about how Putin is saving the Donbas from the decadence (gay pride parades, etc.) that Ukraine has been allowing.
You seem to be ignoring the huge moral dive it is to begin arming Ukraine with WMDs against Russia.
Until February 2022, Donbass looked like just another proxy war NATO was planning on fanning indefinitely at low heat.
To what WMD’s are you referring? There is a huge moral difference between biolabs and biological weapons. The USA has totally renounced the use of biological weapons, but it has labs that maintain quantities of deadly organisms, to explore means of defense against them.
I don’t get your use of the term “proxy war.” Why would a war to regain control of a rebellious region of one’s own country be a proxy war? It seems even more farfetched than claiming that Mussolini fought a proxy war for Hitler by invading Greece, and Hitler certainly didn’t see it that way.
By the way, USA’s renunciation of biological weapons is absolute, unlike its conditional renunciation of chemical weapons: it has only renounced first use of chemical weapons, but has not ruled out retaliation in kind if attacked by chemical weapons.
Your constant claims of ignorance aren’t particularly convincing.
More likely you’re deliberately begging the question as a trolling technique.
Try a little observation. Even read the readouts from the Kremlin.The safe passages, buses, food etc are all prepared by Russia , but the Nazi friends of yours are holding the people including many foreigners as human shields and will not let any of them out. This has been going on for three days.
I abhor Nazism, and you are bordering on libel by talking about nonexistent “Nazi friends” of mine.
Unlike you, I merely ask: do you have any Stalinist friends?
I actually had one when I was a postdoc at the university of Chicago in 1973-1974, but he had a great sense of humor which seems to be utterly lacking in this forum among propagandists like yourself.
I’d love to “try a little observation,” but you provide none; you only make unsupported allegations which seem to be boilerplate Putin-supporting propaganda.
What’s irrelevant is what Ukraine needs now. The US, NATO and Ukraine took provocative and aggressive steps to get this conflict started, and now are irrelevant to the inevitable outcome: Russia seizing much or all of Ukraine. The US will keep sending enough weapons to bleed Russia a bit more, and expect Russia to return the favor indiscreetly the next time the US invades somewhere.
My bias is to care about the things I can do something to change (US policy), and to learn from history rather than being condemned to repeat it. Few if any wars are necessary or constructive; Remember your indignation about this one the next time the US picks another fight against a target it can push around / Shock and Awe / sanction to death.
Thanks for making it clear that you, who seem to be more sympathetic to Russia than to the US, nevertheless think you cannot do anything to affect Russia’s policy.
However, you are way off base if you think that Putin’s massive escalation of the conflict which shocked the world had anything to do with some unidentified fight that the US “picked.” With that attitude, you haven’t a prayer of changing US policy.
My sympathies are for humanity and against war, an attitude which neither the US nor Russian governments care much about.
Did “Shock and Awe” of Iraq or dropping “The Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan not “shock the world” with its “massive escalation”? Yes, if any US officials who might change policy are unable to understand the numerous aggressive steps the US has taken, they aren’t likely to stop engaging in that aggression. I’m hoping they have more ability to recognize reality and empathize with the other than you do.
What do you mean, “empathize with the other”? I never said one thing in praise of US policy either in Ukraine or in the other places you name. The Soviets were wrong about many things, but they were right about the USA being an imperialist country.
However, if you are against war, don’t you draw a distinction between limited wars like the First Gulf War and all out wars with massive civilian casualties? Putin could have had a limited war if he had been content with securing the independence of Donbass. Instead, he shocked one of his best allies in Europe, Czech President Zeman, into calling him a “lunatic” for his full scale war against Ukraine:
Zeman had previously made news by calling Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula “a fait accompli.”
Many in the Czech Republic reviled Zeman as a “servant of Kremlin” after he sided with Russia and cast doubt on the findings of his own security and intelligence services on the alleged participation of Russian spies in a huge 2014 ammunition explosion.
Until just days ago, Zeman was insisting that the Russians wouldn’t attack Ukraine because “they aren’t lunatics to launch an operation that would be more damaging for them than beneficial.”
“I admit I was wrong,” he said Thursday.
Zeman has called for harsh sanctions against Russia, including cutting it out of the SWIFT financial system which shuffles money from bank to bank around the globe.
“It’s necessary to isolate a lunatic and not just to defend ourselves by words but also by deeds,” he said.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/invading-ukraine-putin-loses-allies-eastern-europe-83092142
“The view is shared by some in the White House, who are concerned that transfers of anti-tank and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles will make Washington an active belligerent in the conflict.”
Zowie!! Talk about the ship sailing long ago. Never more applicable.
“applicable” to what? to the alarmists in the White House who are paranoid at this late date about the shipments that EU initiated somehow make the USA an “active belligerent”?
By the way, do you have any idea about what the passage that you’ve quoted from the article is based on? Neither quote nor link is provided for it.
Applicable to the cliche I used. You couldn’t figure that out? Washington was an “active belligerent” long ago.
I would love to expound on what you have said but it would require a ton of expletives….
Why bother with expletives? You could do us both a favor by discovering just whom, and what, the authors of the article had in mind when they wrote,
The view is shared by some in the White House, who are concerned that transfers of anti-tank and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles will make Washington an active belligerent in the conflict.
wars r u.s. seems unequal to the task, perhaps because according to his/her vocabulary, Washington is already an active belligerent in the conflict.
But do give vent to expletives if it helps to motivate you to figure out just what Kyle Anzalone and/or Will Porter were trying to express with the words I have italicized.
Don’t worry: I am inured to expletives as a result of about twenty years of debate with closed-minded fanatics of various sorts. Fortunately, I have encountered a number of reasonable people with whom I could amicably agree to disagree, and that helps to keep me going.
“wars r u.s. seems unequal to the task, perhaps because according to his/her vocabulary, Washington is already an active belligerent in the conflict.”
Has been for over 30 years. Biden was just asking for 10 billion more of belligerence. Does active only mean pulling triggers? And those sanctions aren’t acts of kindness. And I’m a his.
If that is “active belligerence,” what words could you muster if an EU army marched into a modest portion of western Ukraine, about the size of the territory that Russian forces have (mostly violently) seized up to now?
The idea would be to make possible a retreat of the government to Lviv if the fight to save Kyiv became hopeless, and to provide for refugees fleeing the fighting but not wanting to further burden countries to the west who have been extremely hospitable, such as Poland.
The troops would not need to be any more violent than the divisions which occupied the eastern provinces that had been declared independent states by Putin. That occupation was almost bloodless because the people there welcomed the Russian troops instead of resisting them as the citizens of Kyiv and Kharkiv have been doing.
It would be similar if these hypothetical occupiers of Lviv and vicinity, and points west, did what I suggest, for similar reasons.
The US wants to sell or lease Poland new or surplussed US fighters, obviously.
While flying donated planes in from NATO airfields is out of the question, they can be trucked in over the border.
Russia’s lack of air power assets means they won’t be covering Polish border traffic on the ground that closely.
However, they have began long-range missile attacks against Western Ukraine air bases.
In any case, Poland is calling the reports fake news. They may want those planes for their own defense.
Which Poland will not need. If they stay out of the conflict. I believe Russia does not want another front. Russia will not go into Poland.
No, but if they have to Russia will fire at Ukrainian aircraft in Polish airspace and on Polish airfields, endangering Polish military personnel, civilians, and infrastructure.
Under what circumstances do you envision Russia “having to” fire at Ukrainian aircraft in Polish airspace and on Polish airfields?
Would turning Poland into a no-fly zone for Russian aircraft be sufficient “provocation” in Putin’s mind?
Keep in mind that US aircraft refrained from firing on Chinese aircraft in Chinese airspace or Chinese airfields all through the Korean war, when China was the main belligerent against the UN forces.
The US voluntarily refrained from attacking into Chinese territory to avoid a greater Korean war formally involving Russia.
Poland already is a no-fly zone for Russian aircraft; they have banned all Russian flights from their airspace, including military.
However, if Polish territory and airspace are used to attack Russian forces in Ukraine, such as enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine – – Poland will have formally entered the war and Russia.
Your questions, are painfully nonsensical.
Those S400s will see some action soon. And will create an excuse to trigger article 5. Fools…
“An active belligerent…?” How very polite and somewhat tepid. I with-hold myself from expounding any further…. Having said that, when bloody bombs start falling I am going to have some very colorful expletives to share…!!!
Top Diplomat Blinky scores again.
I hear not. According to some sources he had an earfull of angry allies in the meeting un Lindon about cutting of Russisn oil. Present were UK, Netherlands and Germany, apparently Johnson the loudest. Blunken is apparently getting ever so obnoxious. With European economies taking the hit, they are in no mood.
“… vowing to replenish Warsaw’s fleet with American fighter jets.”
The obsolete Polish planes will instantly be destroyed. While the Big Bucks for the US manufactured “replenishment” jets will flow ever-so-smoothly into the MIC’s bank accounts.
Mission Accomplished!
Well, it is not too complicated. Ukraine for a while now has been ruled by Lvov. These planes are meant for Lvov, as this has been the hub of Western operatoons ever since the days of dissidents,
Aftet Maidan they controlled Kiev.
According to Chinese source Zelenski has been in Poland since US Embassy organized a speciis operations overnight trip from Lvov to Poland.
These arms and defences are for Galicia’s three provinces. They cannot fly anywhere east as there is a no fy zone estsblished by Russia. There are no functioning radars, no military runways anywhere east or south of Zhotomir.
Cities now under siege are majority Russian population. And defenders militias, like Azov in Mariupol. This is why militias are firing on evacuees. These people are seen enemies. At some point they will run out of ammunition. Perhaps then they will allow evacuatiom
to escape with civilians. It is a shame that such very basic facts about this war are covered up.
We have no more war corespondents.
The U.S. says they abandoned the plan, but have they really?
Will Russia attack those planes while they are still in Poland?
It certainly will if they fly even one mission from a Polish base.
They might even if scheduled for transfer. The US would and did the same in other wars.
Plane donations are just propaganda, though. Ukraine’s air force is obsolete and so is Poland’s. Poland, is not likely sending their F-16’s.
However, Poland and Ukraine flew the same Mig-19s and SU-22s, and maintained them into modern times.
There’s no point flying any planes in; Russia would know their point of origin, and if not shot down en route, destroyed where they land.
The only way this comes close to making any sense at all is to truck or rail them in from Poland to the nearest Ukraine airbase. The Soviets made transportabilty a design element.
Russia demolished most of the Ukraine air force on the ground. Ukraine still has airfields and pilots, but no planes.
Unloading fighter jets on Ukraine only makes sense if there is somehow a large pool of trained, experienced, and somehow unemployed fighter pilots available to man them. Is there such a pool? Because you can not simply stuff a body in the cockpit. 🙂
Ukraine lost most of their fighters on the ground; they have pilots but few planes left.
The MIG-29’s and SU-22’s likely up for transfer were types used by both Ukraine and Poland during the Soviet era into modern times.
Poland has refused this ploy, according to the Polish Minister of Defense.
Try to keep up.
Putting out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. Smart move.
Poland and Romania have already said they won’t supply aircraft to Ukraine and Blinken should know this. So he and the State Department are either utterly incompetent or they are sick evil b*stards as they’re doing this to encourage Ukrainians to continue to die pointlessly to help Washington to achieve it’s foreign policy objectives.
This is the post that got me banned from all MSM media and all my previous posts removed and a shadow ban……..(only 1 or 2 sites i can actually post to now)
Wikipedia………………Nayirah testimony…………………………….The Nayirah testimony was false testimony given before the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl who was publicly identified at the time by her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to support Kuwait in the Gulf War.
In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah’s last name was Al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيرة الصباح) and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah’s testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.[1][2]
In her testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
Her story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, a British NGO, which published several independent reports about the killings[3] and testimony from evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, reporters were given access to the country. An ABC report found that “patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait’s nurses and doctors … fled” but Iraqi troops “almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die.”[4] Amnesty International reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the Bush administration of “opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement”.[5]
Poland gets 58% of its oil from Russia. Nord Steam 2 is operational even though it isn’t approved. The smart move would be to lay low.
Sending old aircraft to Ukraine seems more like a gesture than an honest attempt to assist. But, given Blinken’s comment, it looks as if the real plan is to have the US arm Poland with state-of-the-art equipment, just as was done in Ukraine. At every turn, Biden has escalated the threats to Russia.
If someone lights a match, all hell is going to break loose.