What if you don’t want Ukraine to win at all? Why Donald Trump Doesn’t Want to Debate

Valeriy Saluschnyj couldn’t be more clear: It “pukes me up,” the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces recently told the Washington Post. The reason for his dissatisfaction: the army is repeatedly criticized for not being able to achieve faster successes in the Ukrainian offensive.

“Without a full supply, these plans cannot be realized at all,” the general lamented. It is no secret what is on the wish list of its troops: Ukraine has been demanding support with US F-16 fighter jets and extra ammunition for months.

In fact, the first delivery of the fighter jet is still a long way off – and some pundits worry there’s a bigger debate behind it: The political scientist at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, Carlo Masala, recently tweeted that he has a “gut feeling” that the US could hit the brakes to support Ukraine. But is this assumption more than just a feeling?

A recently published report by Britain’s “Daily Telegraph” suggests there may be more to the lack of support for US fighter jets: British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace fell out of favor with US President Joe Biden after Britain’s Britain, without its permission, the training of Ukrainians on fighter jets has begun.

According to the report, Wallace’s decision had far-reaching consequences: Biden would have decided afterwards that he no longer supported the British in succeeding Jens Stoltenberg as NATO secretary general. Instead, the US president switched to the German head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. You can read more about it here.

Military expert Masala recently speculated that the United States may fear that further arms shipments could shock the Russian state. The White House is still skeptical about the supply of long-range missiles, which have so far only been sent to Ukraine from Britain. Biden also announced delivery of Abram’s main battle tanks early in the year, but the vehicles are not expected to arrive in Ukraine until next fall.

“Everyone whose opinion I respect agrees that the US does not want Ukraine to win the war. It is a worrying conclusion, but hard to avoid,” Portuguese political scientist and former secretary of state Bruno Maçães recently tweeted. Some people he talks to also tell him about top secret negotiations in which the US and Russia are already negotiating a peace deal.

On the other hand, there are other reasons why Ukraine is not yet equipped with the fighter jets: the current training in Denmark will take six to eight months, Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said there. At the same time, the Danish Air Force plans to phase out the planes two years early, potentially allowing the jets to arrive in Ukraine more quickly.

In fact, NATO also takes the position that jet delivery is not yet an issue during the current offensive. That is what the head of NATO’s military committee, Rob Bauer, recently told the British radio station “LBC”. However, this does not explain why the delivery of Western fighter jets in general has only gained momentum in recent months. Because Ukraine has long wanted a corresponding delivery, for example by Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba during his visit to Germany in May 2022.

The federal government is also hesitant about the issue. This is justified by the fact that the Bundeswehr does not own any F-16 jets. Instead, however, there is talk of supplying German Eurofighters to Saudi Arabia and 6 A400M aircraft to the United Arab Emirates, Green Party politician Anton Hofreiter criticized on Tuesday. “I think that’s fundamentally wrong, like other Greens. Because we can’t still deny certain weapons to Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia, and at the same time give state-of-the-art weapons to dictatorships and autocracies.” said Hofreiter to the ‘Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland’ (t-online)

With material from press agency dpa