Rishi Sunak and Mark Rutte “agreed that they would work together to build an international coalition to provide Ukraine with combat air capabilities,” Downing Street announced on Tuesday.
London wants to build an “international coalition” to help Ukraine obtain F-16 fighter jets, Downing Street said on Tuesday after a meeting between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte.
Meeting at a Council of Europe summit in Iceland, the two men “agreed that they would work together to build an international coalition to provide Ukraine with combat air capabilities (… ), ranging from training to delivering F16 aircraft,” Downing Street said in a statement.
“A good start for the coalition!” Reacted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his evening message, adding: “Thank you all”.
A repeated request from kyiv
The summit, only the fourth for the pan-European organization in nearly 75 years of existence, aims to increase the means to hold Russia criminally responsible for the destruction and crimes caused by its invasion of Ukraine.
Rishi Sunak there “reiterated his conviction that the legitimate place of Ukraine is within NATO”, underlined Downing Street. “Leaders agree on the importance of allies providing long-term security assistance to Ukraine.”
Zelensky has been asking his Western allies for months to also provide him with planes that would allow the Ukrainian army to strike Russian troops in depth, without however constituting a miracle solution in the conflict.
Monday in London, he repeated that he wanted to set up “a coalition for aircraft” and said he was “very optimistic about it”.
The UK has already delivered anti-tank missiles, artillery guns, air defense systems, armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine. It also supplied British Challenger tanks to Ukraine and trained Ukrainian soldiers to operate them.
