Slovakia handed over to Ukraine the first of the MiG-29 fighter jets promised to Kyiv, the Slovakian government announced on Thursday, citing Reuters.
This was announced by the Minister of Defense of Slovakia, Yaroslav Nad, who said that the rest will be sent to Ukraine in the coming weeks.
His comments came after the Slovak government announced last Friday that it would transfer 11 MiG-29 jets retired last year to Ukraine, becoming only the second country to provide fighter jets to Kyiv.
A week before the announcement, it was Minister Nad who made a public appeal to call for a corresponding decision.
“I think it’s time to make a decision. People are dying in Ukraine, we can really help them, there is no place for Slovak politics,” he wrote in a post on his Facebook page on March 9, referring to the squadron of 11 MiG-29 aircraft.
Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced the possibility of sending MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine as early as last July, but Bratislava did not report anything on this matter until last week.
Slovakia has officially announced that it will hand over its MiG-29s to Ukraine the day after Poland.
The epic with sending MiG-29 aircraft to Ukraine
Back on March 8 last year, less than two weeks after the start of the Russian invasion, Poland said it wanted to send all its MiG-29s to Ukraine immediately and free of charge. Then the government in Warsaw offered to transfer its planes to the American base in Ramstein in Germany and transfer them to Kyiv through the mediation of the United States.
However, Washington rejected this plan, and the Pentagon called it “unviable”.
At the time, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby cited the logistical “complexity” of such an operation, also stating that “it’s just not clear to us whether there is a substantial justification for it.”
Then, at the beginning of July, Prime Minister Eduard Heger, in turn, spoke about the possibility of sending MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine.
“But I don’t want to go into details, because Ukraine asked us not to detail information about them [livrări] equipment,” he said on the TV show CT24, in which he participated together with his Czech colleague Petr Fiala.
Subsequently, the Slovak government showed no signs of this,
In recent months, talks have revolved around the possibility of sending Western fighter jets to Ukraine, with the United States strongly opposing the idea.
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Source: Hot News
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