Nuclear-Capable F-16s for Ukraine Will Only Make a Bad Situation Worse
U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley admits aircraft would not be a magic weapon for Kyiv.
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The U.S. announced last week that it will supply Ukraine with F-16s. Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said he expects these jets to be flying over Ukraine by the first quarter of 2024.
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Oleksii Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, tweeted that Ukraine and 11 other nations had finalized a strategy to provide training for pilots, maintainers, and support personnel to operate U.S.-manufactured F-16s.
F-16 jets can be made to carry the B61 nuclear bomb
The Eurasian Times reported that the Ukrainian forces will be trained by a subcontractor named Draken International.
There are currently more fighter pilots in Ukraine than fighter jets to fly. The Ukrainian air force is generally comprised of Soviet-era Russian fighters, mainly the Mig-29, which first flew in 1977. Al Jazeera said F-16s could offer Ukraine an edge over the Russian air force “but only if combined with powerful missiles and targeting information, which the West would also have to provide.”
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the fighter jets will be destroyed just like the other equipment from the West that have been sent into the country.
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Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, said Moscow has expressed its deepest concerns that the West will be providing Ukraine with F-16s that can carry nuclear warheads, and said its forces will have to respond accordingly.
“We voiced our strongest concern at the meeting of experts of the Nuclear Five nations at the UN Security Council,” he recently said. “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.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN Sunday that it could take “months and months” to provide Ukraine with these fighter jets after Ukrainian pilots are sufficiently trained.
“It’s not just the equipment itself. It’s the training, it’s the maintenance, it’s the ability to use it in combined arms operations. All of that takes time,” Blinken said. “If a decision were made to actually move forward on the F-16s tomorrow, it would be months and months before they were actually operational.”
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 or a major false flag event.
Vassily Nabenzia, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, 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.