Slovakia on Friday joined Poland in pledging to send Ukraine Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets, making the European countries the first two NATO members to provide warplanes to Kyiv.
Slovakia’s prime minister, Eduard Heger, said his country will provide Ukraine with 13 fighter jets. His announcement came a day after Polish President Andrzej Duda said Warsaw will send four MiG-29s in the coming days and that more would be delivered in the future.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the plans were an example of the NATO members “raising the level of their direct involvement in the conflict.” But Peskov also downplayed the significance, saying the MiG-29s will not impact Russia’s war plans.
“The equipment deliveries naturally won’t have any impact on the outcome of the special military operation, but it may bring more misfortune to Ukraine and Ukrainian people,” Peskov said.
According to Slovakia’s Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad, the country will be receiving compensation from its allies for sending the MiG-29s to Ukraine. Slovakia will be granted $213 million from the EU and unspecified arms from the US worth $745 million.
The US has been encouraging the former Soviet republics who are in NATO to ditch their older Soviet-made equipment in exchange for Western-made arms. Slovakia signed a deal with the US in 2018 to purchase 14 F-16 fighter jets to replace their MiG-29s, and the F-16s are expected to be delivered in 2024.
Ukraine has been demanding F-16s and other Western-made fighter jets, but so far, no NATO countries have pledged to send more modern aircraft. But the provision of MiG-29s is still a major escalation of NATO involvement. The Pentagon rejected a Polish proposal to send MiG-29s to Ukraine last year, in March 2022, over escalation concerns. NATO diplomats said at the time that Russia could perceive the move as the alliance directly entering the war.
NATO is directly involved in the Ukraine war.
These countries say that they fear Russian aggression, yet they continue to provoke Russia by continuously providing Ukraine with more and more deadly weapons intended to kill Russians. It looks to me like clear rational thinking is in very short supply in these places.
I know they are mostly some small countries in the east, but we should not lump them all together. It’s Baltics and Poland that are obsessed with war, but Slovakia, bordering both Ukraine and Hungary is largely anti-war, sadly the government is not listening, it was now called off prior Christmas but new elections were delayed till autumn. Per polling 70-80% of population in Slovakia was against sending the jets. It was done by government that was already called off, which per constitution has no right to make such decision so it was an ongoing fight for past months, with almost all lawyers claiming it was unconstitutional. It appears more that there was some external push to proceed.
If government leaders took the wishes of their citizens seriously, the world would be much more peaceful and a better place to live. This is why I oppose centralized political authority.
So, do you oppose the Kremlin?
I oppose authoritarianism, wherever it comes from. If the people of eastern Ukraine want independence from Ukraine then they should be allowed to have it.
Well, Russia invading and annexing Ukraine didn’t make things less scary for them.
Remaining neutral would have been a lot safer than engaging in provocations against Russia. If things escalate then these countries are right in the line of fire. Getting involved was an extraordinary foolish thing for them to do.
They would have been next. As a small country leaving next to Russia, remaining neutral means you are at the merci of who ever leads the Kremlin, having partial control of your country’s internal matters and even worse. deciding to annex your land whenever it wants to.
Do you have any evidence of anything that Russia did which posed a threat to these nations? Not what you imagined that Russia might do. What Russia actually did.
Mindless escalations and echo chamber thinking was what I started the last 2 world wars. It appears we humans haven’t evolved much beyond that. Except we now have enough nuclear weapons to thoroughly destroy each other and the planet…
Interesting position to take
– what concessions would you think would have sufficed to make Hitler not go to war?
– what should the entente have allowed the Austrians to do in Serbia to avoid WWI?
interesting questions there
so what do you think would have sufficed to make Hitler not go to war?
He did not need additional incentives – the way the German economy worked he pretty much had to acquire additional sources of ‘income’ or face the problems their management of the German economy was causing.
Both wars were started through alliances. Foreign alliances were what Geo. Wash. warned America against, guess he was right.
So are we to understand that you would have preferred that the Austrians had a free hand in Serbia in 1914 and that the Germans be allowed a free hand to occupy ever more countries in eastern Europe in 1939?
Is it a solution to the problem of wars to merely surrender to enemies who wishes to take over your lands?
That was for those involved to figure out. WWI and WWII were wars of US intervention for profit, it all comes down to MONEY. Marx was right about that one.
Well good to know where you stand on Nazi Germany.
When the US intervened in WWI, it resulted in the unfair treaty which blamed Germany for everything at Versailles, which resulted in all the tragedies and hardships in Germany; then came Hitler. You know the rest.
If you read up on it, or you already had done so you would know that the US argued fiercely against the hard conditions of the Versailles treaty – furthermore you would know that the Allies were already winning and the US contribution militarily in WWI was insignificant. So no the US did not cause the hardships in Germany the French and especially the English did that.
Wash. gave lip service but did nothing at Versailles to stop the injustice against Germany caused by France and England. It’s all about banking systems. Marx was right about that one. And the US did help end the war through the use of tanks to break through the trench warfare system.
No the US did not help end the war with tanks – the US had only produced 64 tanks by the armistice so that is a flat no. As for the US not forcing the English and French to agree to terms more lenient towards Germany, the reason that this could not be achieved was exactly that Germany was beaten by UK and France and they could thus go on without US help.
The only pressure point the US had was to call in the loans, and that would not have worked as the UK and or France could default on the debt, which would not have been in the interests of the US let alone anyone else.
Without the US, England and France would have lost. But, we agree to disagree. Bye!
Read up on it – England and France had won by the time the Michael offensive of 1918 had failed – that took place in late March 1918 – the US deployment to the Front was even by May 1918 only about 500.000 men – the notion that the English and French could not have beaten the Germans without US troops or tanks is for the birds.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/voices-of-the-first-world-war-the-german-spring-offensive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Forces#African_Americans
Do you include Putin in your list of “humans that haven’t evolved much beyond that,”
I sure Not. He is a special case.
Yea, history has shown that human nature hasn’t evolved much since neanderthal 1 realized that he could club neanderthal 2 with a stick or rock.
Fools, eagerly digging their won graves.
I have no doubts Wash. has bribed every NATO member to do its will. Why else would they be digging their own graves as robert scheetz said below?
I remember reading about this on a Russian site over the weekend.
They of course were blustering and mocking them but I did glean these jets are from the 1990’s.
I doubt this isn’t much more than a opportunity to upgrade a aging fleet (Biden or the EU will replace them) and will be flown by pilots with no experience against Russians who will be in the latest model with scads of seat time in them.
I give them a life span of less than 72 hours…poor guys….