F-16s for Ukraine Can be Modified to Carry Nukes, Would Change Everything: Lavrov
Comments came before top Lockheed Martin official said company prepared to modify fighters for Kyiv.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, said Moscow has expressed its deepest concerns that the West will be providing Ukraine with F-16s that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, and said its forces will have to respond accordingly.
His comments to RT TV came before The Financial Times published an article that cited Frank St John, Lockheed Martin’s chief operating officer, who said, “We are standing by, ready to not only backfill need as it arises with new F-16 builds but also any modifications to F-16s as well as training, equipment, and systems.”
Lavrov said the F-16 would be a significant escalation because the jet can be modified to carry nukes.
“We have stated this publicly. We voiced our strongest concern at the meeting of experts of the Nuclear Five nations at the UN Security Council. The Americans tried to downplay the issue saying, do you really think we will give Ukraine jets carrying nuclear weapons? We said that we are not even thinking. Our systems monitoring those jets will not be able to tell a plane carrying nuclear weapons from the one that is not carrying them. To answer your question about our response, it will be made by the military. They know what is to be done.”
F-16 jets can be made to carry the B61 nuclear bomb.
The US Air Force budget request for Fiscal Year 2015 shows that integration of the B61-12 on NATO F-16 and Tornado aircraft, the Federation of American Scientists reported.
Lavrov went on to say that it is unrealistic to say that NATO is not in a direct war with Moscow after providing Ukraine with billions in weapons, training, and intelligence.
“We have long understood NATO’s goals regarding the situation in Ukraine,” Lavrov told Tass. “These objectives were worked out a long time ago, after the state coup [in Ukraine]. NATO is trying to implement them now.”
Lavrov said in another interview that it will be hard to come to any kind of agreement to end the conflict because “The West has ‘lost’ Russia at this point of history. I have no doubts whatsoever about it. The sooner we shed the remaining illusions, the better it will be for our own growth.”
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long said the Ukraine War will continue to drag on, and, in the process, move the world closer to a nuclear exchange. We have said WWIII will not be declared until the first nuclear flash.
Vassily Nabenzia, the permanent representative, told the UN Security Council earlier this year that “everything could have ended differently for Ukraine” if it followed the agreements that he said paved the way for peace by granting special status to Russian speakers in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics.
Most Americans know nothing about the historic relationship between Ukraine and Russia, yet they swallow the mainstream media’s soundbite propaganda that this is somehow an unprovoked war “of Russian aggression.”
But only those interested in educating themselves are aware that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the Minsk agreements were an effective ruse to give Ukraine time to “get stronger” for its next conflict with Russia.
During the 2014 uprising, some 97 percent of the citizens of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea voted to leave Ukraine for integration of the region into the Russian Federation.