Quote:
Originally Posted by ZTT
The way I read it[1], it was a bullshit play from Poland.
If Poland wants to give its Migs to Ukraine they can fly them to Ukraine.
Instead they wanted to move the crosshairs of any Russian retaliation to the US/Germany by flying them to Ramstein Air Base.
And if Poland wants to BUY F-16s, nobody is stopping them. The way it reads in the article below, though, and the Polish government statement it links to, sounds like they wanted F-16s in return for the Migs.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ets-us-ukraine |
The way it's presented here and the way i've read it pretty much everywhere, is that the US was proposing that we give UA the MIGs, and that they would discuss how they could back-fill the Polish fleet because we can't be without 20something planes suddenly - except that the next batch of F16s is going to Taiwan and we'd have to wait a long time. We don't have a thousand planes, we have a war going on over our border and we simply can't be without these planes - thus if the US wanted us to give the planes we need SOMETHING to defend ourselves with.
Then came the proposal that we are ready to give these migs to the US, for free, immediately and that we are immediately ready to BUY used surplus F16s from the US, and suddenly the US does a 180 saying the MIGs should not be provided to UA.
So in a nutshell, they tried to maneuver us into a position where we would be the aggressors against Russia and then NATO would tell us to go fuck ourselves, since we got ourselves involved they won't defend us. Poland is militarily even smaller then UA, so russia threatening us and russia having to threaten the US are two different things. Russia can't really take out many US airfields, but they can launch missle strikes on Poland from Kaliningrad.