A US Air Force airman marshals an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft at the 86th Air Base near Fetesti, Romania, on February 17, 2022
(Picture: via REUTERS)Britain will look “favourably” at Volodymyr Zelensky’s plea for fighter jets from the West, a minister said on Tuesday.
Roads minister Richard Holden stressed that the UK had taken the lead in supplying weapons to Ukraine.
Pressed on Poland and the Netherlands signalling that they may be willing to supply planes, Mr Holden told Sky News: “The Government will always look at all options.”
Pressed by presenter Kay Burley if the UK would look at the jet request “favourably”, he added: “I’m sure we will always look at everything that president Zelensky asks for favourably.
“That’s why we have been the ones pushing on heavy armour.”
Britain was the first nation to pledge to send tanks, with Ukrainian troops now being trained to use 14 Challenger IIs.
Germany, the US and other allies have followed the UK’s lead in promising to send battle tanks to Ukraine ahead of planned spring offensives.
Mr Holden’s comments came hours after Joe Biden said the United States will not provide Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets despite renewed calls from Kyiv for air support to fight Russia.
Asked if the US would provide the jets, Mr Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday: “No.”
Ukraine planned to push for Western fourth-generation fighter jets such as the F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks last week, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister has said.
“The next big hurdle will now be the fighter jets,” Yuriy Sak, who advises Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters on Friday.
While the US has ruled out giving F-16s, other allies appear ready to entertain such a request.
French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in The Hague on Monday that “by definition, nothing is excluded” when it comes to military assistance.
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also did not rule out a possible supply of F-16s to neighbouring Ukraine.
Mr Biden’s comment came shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had begun exacting its revenge for Ukraine’s resistance to its invasion with relentless attacks in the east.
Mr Zelensky has warned for weeks that Moscow aims to step up its assault after about two months of virtual stalemate along the front line that stretches across the south and east.
While there was no sign of a broader new Russian offensive, the administrator of Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province, Denis Pushilin, said Russian troops had secured a foothold in Vuhledar, a coal-mining town whose ruins have been a Ukrainian bastion since the outset of the war.
Mr Pushilin said Ukrainian forces were continuing to throw reinforcements at Bakhmut, Maryinka and Vuhledar, three towns running from north to south just west of Donetsk city. The Russian state news agency TASS quoted him as saying Russian forces were making advances there, but “not clear-cut, that is, here there is a battle for literally every metre.”
Ukraine still controls Maryinka and Vuhledar, where Russian attacks were less intense on Monday, according to Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov.
Mr Pushilin’s adviser, Yan Gagin, said fighters from Russian mercenary force Wagner had taken partial control of a supply road leading to Bakhmut, a city in Donetsk region that has been Moscow’s main focus for months.
A day earlier, the head of Wagner said his fighters had secured Blahodatne, a village just north of Bakhmut.
Kyiv said it had repelled assaults on Blahodatne and Vuhledar, and Reuters could not independently verify the situations there. But the locations of the reported fighting indicated clear, though gradual, Russian gains.
Mr Zelensky said Russian attacks in the east were relentless despite heavy casualties on the Russian side, casting the assaults as payback for Ukraine’s success in pushing Russian forces back from the capital, northeast and south earlier in the conflict.
“I think that Russia really wants its big revenge. I think they have (already) started it,” Mr Zelensky told reporters in the southern port city of Odesa.
Russian forces shelled a dozen settlements in the Bakhmut sector over the past 24 hours and trained tank, mortar and artillery fire on towns near Avdiivka to the south, the Ukrainian Army general staff said late Monday.
In central Zaporizhzhia region and in southern Kherson region, Russian forces shelled more than 40 settlements. In Kherson, the Russians shelled towns on the left bank of the Dnipro River that they abandoned in November, Kyiv said. Targets included the city of Kherson, where there were casualties.
