After tanks and other armored vehicles, Ukraine now hopes that its allies will want to equip it with fighter planes, aerial means of which it does not have any. Negotiations have started between kyiv and Paris around the Mirage 2000 but France is reluctant to let go of its fighters.
Up to now, Ukrainian hopes have essentially focused on the reinforcement of Western heavy tanks, start with German Leopard-2s. Now that Ukraine has got the warranty that these will be satisfied, she moves on to another page of her order book.
kyiv is now asking for missiles and, above all, planes. President Volodymyr Zelensky has it stated quite clearly in his speech on Wednesday. “We must also allow the delivery of long-range missiles to Ukraine, it is important. We must also (…) make it possible to send fighter planes”.
Ongoing discussions
His Defense Minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, confirmed this in an interview published in Le Figaro Thursday, emphasizing, with a smile, his intention to continue to “harass” his European counterparts to enrich his country’s arsenal.
According to information from BFMTV this Friday, if the export of Rafale to Ukraine seems ruled out from the outset, exchanges have started well between kyiv and Paris around a possible French delivery of Mirage 2000, aircraft of hunters built by Dassault, according to a senior officer close to these exchanges. But France is for the moment resistant to the idea of acceding to the Ukrainian request.
“Airplane Month”
Our columnist for foreign policy issues, Patrick Sauce, who was able to verify the reality of these negotiations, first predicted:
“The month of February will arrive, it will be the month of the plane. In almost all the chancelleries the telephone will ring.”
Focusing on the French case, he weighted automatically: “These discussions are only going in one direction for the moment.” In other words, “a lot of questions arise but for now the answer is negative”, the journalist later explained.
Pressing issues
“Yes, the Ukrainians are really thinking regarding asking France for planes. They are thinking even more regarding asking France to train Ukrainian pilots.” However, the summit of the State opposes a triple curtain between the solicitation of planes by Ukraine and their delivery: the opportunity of such a gift or loan, its sustainability for France, stewardship.
“Is it going to be of any use for the Ukrainians? That is to say planes that might bomb Russian areas but Russian areas protected by very sophisticated anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems”, questions Patrick Sauce.
Truth be told, both sides bristled at these devices. So much so that if the Ukrainians lack the resources to rise to the sky, the Russians also avoid crossing it.
There is Mirage 2000-D and Mirage 2000-5
Patrick Sauce then developed the second criterion: “Then, will it reduce France’s aircraft fleet? We know that we are going to switch to all Rafale, but there is a small delta, particularly between 2023 and 2024 where we are going to remove our Mirage 2000s but where we will not yet have the equivalent number of Rafales, so it would be good to keep some on hand”.
Judging by the figures provided by the Ministry of the Armed Forces to BFMTV, the squad of Mirage 2000s available to France is indeed nothing miraculous. On the one hand, there are only 113 devices. On the other hand, not all have the same faculties… and do not display the same form.
“They are of two types: the Mirage 2000-D and -5”, introduced General Jérôme Pellistrandi, BFMTV consultant for defense issues. The officer specified that on these 113 Mirage 2000-D or Mirage 2000-5, it was necessary to subtract 55 of them in the course of “renovation”.
It is more specifically the Mirage 2000-D that we pamper precisely because they still have “significant potential”. And the Mirage 2000-5? “The Mirage 2000-5s are more of an end-of-life model,” warned the general.
Maintenance and future
In addition to these difficulties, Patrick Sauce specifies that the workforce has an eye – and a particularly finicky eye – on a final criterion, the question of “maintenance and “everything that goes around the plane”:
“That is to say the pilot that we are going to train but also the system which means that an aircraft, in 2023, faced with MIG aircraft or Sukoi which are for some very advanced in Russia will be able to evolve in any a security bubble. “And that is even more difficult to obtain than tanks,” highlighted the journalist.
“We do not transfer a plane like we can transfer an armored vehicle”, added General Jérôme Pellistrandi. And yet the thing should not be so obvious for the armored vehicles. The lack of warranty in terms of maintenance is already one of the sticking points regarding the eventual shipment of Leclerc heavy tankswhile France agreed to give AMX-10RC“fire reconnaissance” tanks, much lighter.
BFMTV’s Defense consultant noted, however, that if the discussions were not successful today on the delivery of fighter planes, they would not necessarily be extinguished: “The question of the supply of planes may arise in the months and years to come, because Ukraine will have to have the capabilities to defend itself once morest what will be the Russia of tomorrow”.
Original article published on BFMTV.com
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