Joe Biden on Monday categorically refused the idea of sending American F-16 fighter planes to Ukraine.
“No”, said the American president when a journalist questioned him at the White House on the possibility of providing the devices demanded by the Ukrainian leaders.
Westerners have just taken a step forward in military aid to Ukraine, after Germany and the United States announced the sending of tanks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is calling for even greater assistance, including the delivery of long-range missiles and combat aircraft.
Berlin has already rejected this idea outright, while French President Emmanuel Macron has cautiously considered that “by definition, nothing [n’était] excluded”, while assuring that the Ukrainians had not made him a request to this effect to date.
However, “it is in the light of these three criteria that we will continue to look at case by case” the deliveries of military equipment, he added after having posed the same criteria for the possible sending of tanks Leclerc.
“It is according to the requests that are made but not according to the rumors that are made” that the decisions are taken, again underlined the French head of state, specifying that the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Oleksiï Reznikov, was expected Tuesday in Paris for talks with his counterpart Sébastien Lecornu.
As February 24 approaches, which will mark one year since the invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden did not want to say if he would travel to Europe on this occasion.
But he assured that he would go, without specifying a date, to Poland, a country which plays a key role in the response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“I’m going to Poland, but I don’t know when,” he told reporters, returning to Washington after a short trip to the city of Baltimore, Maryland.