Ukraine is now getting warplanes, although not the coveted U.S.-made F-16s it has been pushing for.
In what counts as another milestone in the West’s willingness to increase security assistance to the war-ravaged nation, NATO members Poland and Slovakia announced last week they will jointly be donating their entire inventory of Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine.
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, the Poles have some 28 MiG-29s in their inventory, but it is unknown how many of them are still airworthy. The remainder of the Polish fleet would follow after the planes had been “serviced and prepared,” Duda said. The Polish MiG-29s are scheduled to be backfilled by new generation American F-35s and South Korean Golden Eagles.
Even though Ukraine has yet to receive the F-16 fighter jets it wants, Poland has yet again created a dam break in Western security assistance. It was the first country to send Soviet-era T-72 main battle tanks in 2022, months before other NATO allies agreed to dispatch newer Abrams, Challengers and Leopard IIs. To date, Poland has supplied around 330 tanks of various types to Kyiv, far more than any other country.
The announced transfer of the Polish aircraft marks the first time Ukraine has been directly and openly supplied with fighter jets by a NATO ally. Officially, Kyiv had previously only been supplied with “spare parts,” a program of deliveries that started in April 2022. John Kirby, then the Pentagon press secretary, confirmed that such deliveries had enabled the Ukrainian Air Force to get “quite a number” — thought to be around 20 — of previously inoperable aircraft back in the sky.
It’s hard to know just how many aircraft the Poles have or are sending to Ukraine. They were first supplied with 12 MiG-29s as an ally of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Twenty-two additional East German MiG-29s were transferred to Poland. Fourteen of these were refurbished and pressed into service; the remainder were cannibalized for spare parts. Ten more aircraft were transferred to Poland by the newly independent Czech Republic in 1995.
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