Until now, Ukrainian hopes have been focused mainly on reinforcing Western heavy tanks, starting with the German Leopard-2s. Now that Ukraine has obtained assurance that these will be fulfilled, it is turning to another page of its order book.
Kyiv is now asking for missiles and, above all, planes. President Volodymyr Zelensky made this very clear 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 jets.”
ongoing discussions
His defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, confirmed this in an interview published in le figaro on Thursday, underlining, with a smile, his intention to continue “harassing” his European counterparts in order to enrich his country’s arsenal.
According to information from BFMTV this Friday, if the export of the Rafale to Ukraine seems ruled out from the start, exchanges have started well between Kyiv and Paris regarding a possible French delivery of the Mirage 2000, a fighter plane built by Dassault, according to a senior official. official close to these exchanges. But France, for the moment, is resistant to the idea of acceding to Ukraine’s request.
“Airplane Month”
Our foreign policy columnist, 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 foreign ministries the telephone will ring”.
Focusing on the French case, he automatically pondered: “These discussions are only going in one direction at the moment.” In other words, “many questions arise but for now the answer is negative,” the journalist later explained.
Urgent matters
“Yes, the Ukrainians are really thinking about ordering planes from France. They are thinking even more about asking France to train Ukrainian pilots.” However, the state summit puts up a triple curtain between Ukraine’s request for planes and their delivery: the opportunity of such a gift or loan, its sustainability for France, guardianship.
“Is it going to help the Ukrainians? That is, planes that can bomb Russian areas but Russian areas protected by very sophisticated anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems,” questions Patrick Sauce.
To tell the truth, both sides were angry with these devices. So much so that if the Ukrainians lack the resources to go up to heaven, the Russians also avoid crossing it.
There are Mirage 2000-D and Mirage 2000-5
Patrick Sauce then developed the second criteria: “So will you reduce France’s aircraft fleet? We know we’re going to switch to all Rafales, but there’s a little delta, particularly between 2023 and 2024 where we’re going to phase out our Mirage 2000 but where We won’t have the equivalent number of Rafales yet, so it would be nice to have some on hand.”
Judging by the figures provided by the Ministry of the Armed Forces to BFMTV, the Mirage 2000 crew available to France is anything but miraculous. For one, there are only 113 devices. On the other hand, not everyone has the same faculties… and they don’t show the same form.
“They are of two types: the Mirage 2000-D and the -5”, introduced General Jérôme Pellistrandi, BFMTV consultant for defense issues. The officer specified that in 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,” the general warned.
maintenance and future
Adding to these difficulties, Patrick Sauce specifies that the workforce has one eye – and a particularly picky eye – on one final criteria, the issue of “maintenance and “everything that goes around the plane”:
“In other words, the pilot that we are going to train, but also the system, which means that an aircraft, in 2023, compared to MIG or Sukoi aircraft, which are very advanced in Russia for some, will be able to evolve in any security bubble” . . “And that is even more difficult to achieve than the tanks,” said the journalist.
“We don’t transfer an aircraft like we can transfer an armored vehicle,” added General Jérôme Pellistrandi. And yet, the thing should not be so obvious for armored vehicles. The lack of maintenance guarantees is already one of the sticking points for the possible shipment of Leclerc heavy tanks, while France has pledged to donate much lighter AMX-10RC “fire reconnaissance” tanks.
The BFMTV Defense consultant pointed out, however, that if the discussions on the delivery of combat aircraft were not successful today, they would not necessarily die out: “The question of the supply of aircraft may arise in the coming months and years, because Ukraine It has to have the capabilities to defend itself against what will be the Russia of tomorrow.”
Source: BFM TV
