President Joe Biden’s hesitation to support the provision of Polish fighter jets to Ukraine drew a scornful rebuke from key Democratic and Republican senators, who dismissed the administration’s objections and implied they could use congressional authority to coerce the Biden team into supporting the transfer.
“There is bipartisan support to provide these planes,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the New Hampshire Democrat who heads the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for Europe, told Pentagon and State Department officials. “It is disappointing to see the reluctance on the part of the administration. And it’s coming across as indecision and bickering among members of the administration, which is not helpful to the cause and not helpful to the administration.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spiked the proposal after Poland blindsided American officials by announcing its willingness to transfer its entire fleet of Russian-designed warplanes to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany.
The Pentagon’s subsequent statement that any such gift would be less effective for Ukrainians than other weapons deliveries, yet simultaneously more provocative to Russia, failed to satisfy lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, who faulted the administration for resisting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s appeal for the warplanes.
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“The two reasons, we’re now learning is, one, that your judgment is superseding that of the Ukrainian military, and, two, you think that it’s somehow more provocative, even though you are saying that you should be sending them and want to send them something that you think is more effective in the field that, by definition, would be something that the Russians would be more concerned about,” Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, said Thursday morning during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Austin’s representative at the hearing, assistant secretary Mara Karlin, maintained that some of the reasons for objecting to the transfer needed to remain classified. “We are giving them capabilities that they are using immediately,” she said, after acknowledging that “escalation considerations do need to factor” into the policy discussion.
The question of providing warplanes to Ukraine has roiled the trans-Atlantic alliance for almost two weeks. European Union High Representative Josep Borrell previously announced that European governments in possession of Russian-made warplanes would send the jets to Ukraine, where pilots know how to operate the legacy-Soviet fighters, only to have those hopes dashed by widespread fears that Russia might retaliate against the countries that provide the planes.
The initial round of objections centered on the logistical question of how such a transfer could be made without flying the planes into Ukraine directly from NATO bases, which Western allies fear would then become legitimate military targets for Russian retaliation. Portman dispensed with that objection, and Karlin’s more generic implication that the Ukrainians could not put the planes to good use, by insisting that they could be delivered by land, like many other weapons shipments that reportedly have proceeded over the Polish-Ukrainian border.
“Their pilots are ready to go,” Portman said. “They’re repairing airfields to be able to use it. They’re willing to take off from highways. They want this right away.”
Karlin, under questioning from Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, suggested that the Ukrainian Air Force isn’t making full use of the “several squadrons of mission-capable aircraft” that they possess already.
“We have not seen them employing those aircraft to the extent that one might suggest,” Karlin said.
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Menendez emphasized his dissatisfaction with what he called “non-answers” to his questions about why the administration objects to the transfer of the warplanes.
“This committee has jurisdiction over arms sales,” the New Jersey Democrat said. “I don’t like using that jurisdiction in a way that doesn’t facilitate our foreign policy and national interest and security, but if I can’t get answers to the fundamental questions, then I will. There may be a perfectly valid and good reason. I think all of us should know so that we can pivot to something else. But if there is no perfectly valid and good reason, then we need to know that, too.”
