The United States, as recently as January, provided Ukraine with its own military helicopters, so it's hard to understand why Poland's offer to transfer Soviet-style MiG-29s to Ukraine was rejected, or why Russian President Vladimir Putin would consider that an escalation of hostilities, Sen. Rob Portman said Sunday.
“The Russians have complained about everything," the Ohio Republican said on CNN's "State of the Union," where he was interviewed while he is visiting Poland. "Putin has said that the sanctions are an act of war. They certainly complained when we provided Stingers directly from the U.S. government, which can knock down an airplane and have been successful in doing that at lower altitudes."
He added that he doesn't know "why that would be true" to consider the transfer an action that could trigger a World War III, considering how the United States has already provided helicopters to Ukraine.
"In this case, this would be Poland providing these airplanes, which are Soviet-style planes, old planes, MiG-29s," he said. "There are also two other countries, Slovakia and Bulgaria, that have these airplanes. What we have heard directly from the Ukrainians is they want them badly. They want the ability to have better control over the skies in order to give them a fighting chance."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month had said the plan to send the fighter jets had gotten a "green light" from the United States, but on Tuesday, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the plan was not tenable.
“I don't understand why we're not doing it," said Portman. "We initially gave it a green light. As you know, last weekend, the secretary of state said it was going to get a green light. And for some reason, now we're blocking it."
Portman, who is part of a congressional delegation this weekend in Poland, said he and other lawmakers have been meeting with refugees as they come across the border, and the message they are giving, "loud and clear," is they want to close the skies through a no-fly zone, and to have the hope of returning to their homes one day.
"Putin and the Russians seem to be saying everything is escalatory, yet they're escalating every single day by coming into Ukraine with these weapons," said Portman. "There's discussion, as you know, of them using vacuum bombs and cluster bombs, cluster bombs against civilian targets. This is a brutal, totally unprovoked attack and increasingly they're choosing civilian targets as they escalate."
Portman also discussed the growing gas prices back in the United States, where it now costs an average of $4.31 a gallon to fill gas tanks.
He is calling on the United States to ramp up oil production and told CNN Sunday that Biden's decision to stop production on the KeystoneXL pipeline is also driving up costs, pushing back on an argument that the lack of the pipeline would have made no difference in gas prices
"Oil prices went up [before the Ukraine invasion] for a lot of reasons," he said. "This administration made it a priority of theirs to stifle domestic production of fossil fuels."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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