AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman
When it comes to audacity, few geopolitical moves top Warsaw’s announcement on Tuesday that Poland was prepared to transfer all 28 of its Mig-29 fighters to the United States, delivering them to the U.S. Airbase in Ramstein, Germany, from which Ukrainian pilots could presumably fly them into combat. After more than ten days when the European Union, Washington, and even the Ukrainians themselves repeatedly stated that the Poles were on the verge of transferring the aircraft to Ukraine only to force denials out of Warsaw, the Polish government had enough. They called the bluff of the United States. Ukraine may or may not receive those Migs, but the Biden administration can no longer pretend that it is the Poles who are standing in the way. The whole sordid affair says a lot about how the Biden administration conducts diplomacy, resorting to a mixture of passive-aggressive leaks against allies, blaming them for American inaction. Biden did this in Afghanistan, and again with Germany in the leadup to the current conflict. We can thank the Poles for exposing it.
To fully grasp the audacity of what Poland did, it is important to pay attention not just to the U.S. response, in which a flustered John Kirby worried that “the prospect of fighter jets at the disposal of the Government of the United States of America’ departing from a U.S./NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace that is contested with Russia over Ukraine raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” and said that “it is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it.” We must also examine the history of a proposal which a mere 24 hours earlier, Secretary of State Blinken explicitly endorsed in Warsaw, offering U.S. replacements for Polish aircraft that went to Ukraine.
The first thing to understand about the “Migs” proposal is that it was always of dubious relevance. The premise was that the Ukrainians, fighting an uphill battle against the Russian air force, would receive transfers of Soviet aircraft from surplus Warsaw Pact stockpiles.
From the start, this limited the quantity of aircraft available, their quality, and the potential sources. The last serious deliveries of aircraft to the Warsaw Pact states occurred almost 35 years ago, and the most modern aircraft involved, the Mig-29 fighter, is widely considered to be inferior to the Sukhoi-27 in use by the Ukrainians, or the more modern Sukhois used by the Russians. China declined to purchase the Mig-29s following the fall of the Soviet Union, holding out for the superior Sukhois, which means the proposal involved aircraft that were inferior to the ones Ukraine already operates. Furthermore, many of the Migs were retired. The most modern variant of the Mig-29 is the Mig-29K operated by Russia and India with almost entirely overhauled electronics, making it functionally an entirely new aircraft. By contrast, the Polish aircraft, originally acquired from East German inventories, are the already downgraded UB model. The Polish Mig-29UBs would be no match for Russian Mig-29Ks, nor modern Suhkois.
The proposal floated by the Biden administration, however, always seemed to be more about doing something, and in particular “something” about Ukraine’s lack of airpower, which played on the propaganda success of the “Ghost of Kyiv” and avoided discussions of “No Fly Zones.” The proposal was therefore always more attractive to the powers which would have to enforce any such “No Fly Zones,” the United States and Western Europe, than it was to countries like Poland, Slovakia, or Romania, which would have to transfer the aircraft in question. What is strange about the proposal is that it was consistently announced by actors who had no power to make it occur.
The European Union first announced it would purchase weapons for Ukraine, including fighters, on February 27th. The following day, Josep Borrell, the E.U. Defense Chief, stated that an agreement had been reached to transfer fighter jets to Ukraine, and a Ukrainian government official posted on Facebook that Ukrainian pilots were already on their way to Polish airbases to pick up the jets. This prompted a denial the following day from the Poles, who indicated they had not been consulted.
The clear public implication, encouraged by E.U. sources, was that a deal had been reached by the E.U., the Ukrainians were on their way to pick up their aircraft, and at the last minute, the Poles had “chickened” out. While this may have been plausible once, it is worth considering a different possibility. At no point did any Polish government official ever indicate they were on board with the idea. A senior E.U. official made the announcement, followed by a Ukrainian official. It seems very possible in light of both the E.U.’s own efforts to scapegoat and demonize the Warsaw government, and how this story played out in the last few days with the United States, that the entire affair was an effort was designed to place the blame for the collapse of a plan which was never serious, and would not have accomplished much if it had been carried out, solely on the shoulders of the controversial nationalist government in Warsaw.
The best evidence for this interpretation is Warsaw’s response when the United States tried the exact same gambit. Starting over the weekend, senior U.S. officials began floating a “3-way trade” in which Poland would transfer its Mig-29s to Ukraine, and in exchange, Poland would receive modern US F-16s. On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told CNN, “We are working with Poland as we speak to see if we can backfill anything that they provide to the Ukrainians.”
The Polish experience in the past has been that the E.U., Ukraine, and now the United States enjoy talking a lot about the prospect of the Poles transferring aircraft, but relish forcing the Poles to kill abstract and hypothetical proposals. That seems to be the context in which the Poles decided that two could play that game. Thus the announcement on Tuesday morning that they would transfer all 28 of their Mig-29s to the U.S. at Ramstein airbase. It is significant that they offered all of their planes. One of the justifications provided by both the E.U. and U.S. for why “talks were ongoing” was that the Poles were “reluctant” to give up a large portion of their air force in the face of a Russian threat. By offering all of their Migs, the Poles demonstrated this was a made-up talking point on the part of the Americans and Europeans.
The reality was that the United States, Germany, and other E.U. states had no desire to take upon themselves any of the risks they were pushing Poland to take. They were happy for Poland to transfer the aircraft if they could magically show up in Ukraine, but the United States and Germany were unwilling to take ownership even for a few hours, much less let them be stored within their territory.
The conclusion that can be drawn from the U.S. response is that the proposals were never serious. The Biden administration, much like the European Union, was determined to pretend that there was a serious effort to get Ukraine jets while ensuring that the “cowardly” Poles who they had never liked would take the fall for these plans never materializing. Now they have no one to blame but themselves.
On a wider level, there are some similarities here to the way the Biden administration tried to counter British and European criticism of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by accusing the Europeans of pulling out too early themselves. Or how the White House clearly wished for Germany to act as the villain in preventing a united front on sanctions that might have deterred Russian action by at least threatening to impose the sanctions which were imposed anyway. The Poles have called Biden’s team out on their blame-shifting, but Warsaw was far from the only victim of this sort of behavior.
Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.