The United States will “inevitably” send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine

CNN political commentator Adam Kinzinger predicted Thursday on “The Situation Room” that the United States will inevitably send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

The anchor Wolf Blitzer said: “Ukraine has already pushed for even more weapons, whose wish list includes fighter jets. Do you see this as the next step for Western allies potentially? »

Kinzinger said: “Yeah, I think what we need to understand here is pretty much all that Ukraine pushed. It took a while for the United States and allies to finally agree that they actually needed this stuff. This is partly because the United States does not want to get too far ahead of Europe. It’s keeping that covenant together. But I think, and this is one of the biggest things that’s happening in this war, which is one of the struggles in Eastern Europe over the last decade or two, is that they’ve old Russian hardware how do they transition to NATO standard equipment obviously very different lines of supply and very different training and actually what this war has done is a lot of that Russian equipment in Eastern Europe was evacuated to Ukraine. They have started to bring many of these Eastern European countries up to full NATO standards. In Ukraine, I think we have to look and recognize that Ukraine will be a NATO standard military equipment country which includes F-16s. They have excess pilot capacity. I spoke to them. In fact, I led the last effort in Congress to start training those who can come here and learn the F-16. It will take a few months because it is a very different set of missions and, of course, a weapon system. This way they are ready if and probably inevitably when the United States and the West decide to send F-16s this way.