West sends Ukraine fighter jets, heavy weapons amid Russian attack in Donbas

The helicopters use a similar operating system as the Mi-8 helicopters that Kyiv has used for decades, said Alexey Muraviev, a national security expert at Australia’s Curtin University.

“We do the best we can with each package to tailor it to the need at the time, and now the need has changed,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday. “The war has changed because now the Russians have prioritized the Donbas area, and that’s a whole different level of fighting, a whole different type of fighting.”

Ukraine’s stiff resistance to Russia’s invasion — combined with Moscow’s pivot to eastern Ukraine that could signal the start of a protracted fight — has changed the calculus in Western countries that were initially reluctant to supply weaponry on which Ukrainian forces had not been trained, said Amael Kotlarski, a senior analyst at open-source defense intelligence agency Janes.

“There’s a realization that [the war] could go on for a lot longer,” Kotlarski said. “If it goes on for longer, then potentially that gives other countries more room to maneuver when it comes to shipping more complex weapons systems and getting Ukraine trained on them.”

Ukraine has also received fighter aircraft and related parts from other nations, Kirby said. He declined to specify what kind of aircraft has been supplied or which countries have provided them, noting only that Ukraine now has “more operable fighter aircraft than they had two weeks ago.”

Poland tried previously to spearhead a multiparty arrangement to send MiG-29 warplanes to Kyiv — a move the United States declined to support, while noting that other countries were free to make their own decisions regarding what assistance they sent to Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has frequently implored NATO and its member nations to send fighter planes to help his forces strike Russian targets.

At the start of a visit to NATO’s Baltic member states , German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Wednesday that Germany has delivered antitank weapons, Stinger antiaircraft missiles “and other things that we didn’t talk about in public so that the deliveries could be carried out quickly and securely.”

Some of the materiel being dispatched by the West will arrive ahead of expected clashes between Russian and Ukrainian troops in the eastern Donbas region that could be particularly bloody, said Chang Jun Yan, a military expert at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Future combat is likely to be larger in scale than recent battles between the two countries, he said, but Ukrainian troops who have faced off against Russian-backed separatists in the region for years are well-trained to fight in Donbas.

But fresh weapons deliveries and familiarity with terrain do not necessarily give Ukrainian forces an advantage against Russian troops with superior arms. A senior U.S. defense official said this week that Russia was learning from its failure to seize Kyiv, the capital, and making adjustments to its command-and-control and logistics structures.

“The resupply of Ukraine is not just important but has to happen quickly and has to happen in large scale,” said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army major general, who has been analyzing the invasion. “It also has to assume that the Russians might interdict some shipment.”

The donations come with risks: Russia warned in a formal diplomatic note to the United States last week that U.S. and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine could bring “unpredictable consequences.” Russia experts suggested that Moscow may be preparing to attack weapons convoys coming into the country.

Why is Ukraine’s Donbas region a target for Russian forces?

Other Western nations have also moved to deliver more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine as the war evolves. Britain in April pledged a defense support package worth some $130 million that includes more antitank missiles, air defense systems and nonlethal equipment. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Tuesday that his government is sending “heavier” military equipment soon.

Norway announced Wednesday that it had donated…