Ukrainian parliament member Kira Rudyk said that while transferring the used MiG-29s would “definitely make a difference,” she worries there may be no airports left standing in Ukraine by the time the U.S. and Poland reach a deal.
“What we see from Russia’s tactics—they’ve been bombing our airports. So by the time when we will get the jets—which I do really hope from the bottom of my heart will happen at some point—we may not have airports for them to fly from,” Rudyk told CNN on Monday. “This is another critical time issue, that everything that used to take months, right now, needs to take hours.”
The White House has been engaging in ongoing talks with Poland to discuss sending warplanes to Ukraine amid pleas from many Ukrainian officials. Poland is seeking assurance from the Biden administration that the U.S. will send fighter jets to help backfill Poland’s supply should their MiGs be sent to Ukraine for the time being.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the administration is “actively” looking into helping fill Poland’s jet gap, but stopped short of providing a timeline on when those negotiations would be reached.
While the U.S. has stated that its troops will not fight in the war and has opposed declaring a highly requested no-fly zone over Ukraine, citing concerns of launching a direct attack on Russia, President Joe Biden has been willing to continue sending military weapons to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24.
In less than a week, the U.S. and NATO have sent more than 17,000 anti-tank weapons over the borders of Poland and Romania to be brought to Ukraine’s major cities.
On Monday, Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he’d be fine with that arrangement as long as the fighter jets arrive as soon as possible.
“Please supply to Poland, to Germany, to the Slovak Republic, the jets from NATO and deliver us all Soviet planes,” Poroshenko told CNN’s John Berman. “We don’t need your soldiers. We don’t need your pilots. We need just jets to keep the airspace above us secure.”
On the other hand, Rudyk said while she would also like to see the arrival of Polish MiGs, the delivery of planes may very well be impossible without a no-fly zone in place.
“We need jets that will still be able to fly from Ukrainian airports while we still have airports,” Rudyk said. “This is a chicken-and-egg situation. We need a no-fly zone to protect our airports. We need a no-fly zone to protect our nuclear plants…[Russian President Vladimir Putin] is a war criminal and he is crazy. Right now, he’s bombing our airports to lower down the chances we could use our allies’ jets to fight him back.”
“Every single hour we are winning, we are winning with Ukrainians who are paying for it with their lives. We are spilling blood for us to have time for these negotiations, these decision-making processes,” she added.
On Sunday, eight Russian missiles “completely destroyed” an airport in the city of Vinnytsia.
In response to the airstrike, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky released a video renewing his calls for a no-fly zone, adding that “If you don’t at least give us planes so we can protect ourselves, there’s only one thing to conclude: you want us to be killed very slowly.”
