Vocal Voices

The Polish foreign minister, Zbigniew Rau, said his government was “ready to deploy – immediately and free of charge – all their MiG-29 jets to the Ramstein air base and place them at the disposal of the government of the United States of America”.

Poland is thought to have 28 of the Soviet-era warplanes, and has been in negotiation with the Biden administration on a three-way deal to supply Ukraine with air power, on condition that the MiGs would be replaced by newer US jets.

The deal has the effect of sharing the risk of Russian retaliation with the US, which will decide how and when to hand them to the Ukrainian air force.

“Poland requests the United States to provide us with used aircraft with corresponding operational capabilities,” Rau said in a statement on his ministry’s website. “Poland is ready to immediately establish the conditions of purchase of the planes.”

Essentially Poland gets a $0 switch from their old Russian jets to used NATO jets. The US gets to support Ukraine with hardware they can use and have spares for, but foot the bill for the used planes.

US rejected it. Telling Putin and everyone else in the world that the US will not get involved in this conflict. Putin wants to go all out, he's going to be allowed to other than sanctions which he clearly isn't bothered about.

Once Biden wakes up he might realise that the world is not quite as he would like it.

I also wonder when it will occur to NATO that the best thing that can happen here is that Putin attacks NATO with conventional weapons. Freeing NATO to respond. The easiest way to do this would be to allow Ukraine to operate fighter bombers from NATO space with NATO air defence screens. Just as Russia is doing to Ukraine from Russian sites with Russian defence screens.

If we did that Putin could not win and would be forced to either attack NATO or go home. If he attacks NATO, he was always going to and it just gets it out up front.

You don't appease the playground bully. You get together and tan the hide out of him till he gets the message.

But it looks like we're stuck with the sanctions path.

For now.

I think political opinion in the States is against getting involved in foreign wars atm. Both Obama and Trump essentially said that Europe was getting a free ride defence wise from the USA.
Biden withdrew from Afghanistan.
Unless Putin attacks a NATO member at which point everything changes.

So we push him to either back down or attack NATO.

Either way Ukraine survives.

What we doing now it loses.