Reply To: Russian Tensions
There is much discussion in the media over the supply of sophisticated fighter planes to Ukraine and one of the reasons offered for not supplying those is that elaborate training is required.
While this may be one of the reasons, I think the real problem is that NATO has tried to make this war a war of defence and limited to within Ukraine’s official pre-2014 frontier, ignoring the annexations of Crimea and the Donbas
Long-range missile systems were provided only on the condition that they were not used on Russian rear lines
in its territory. There has been the occasional attack on Russian airfields but by drones and kept purposefully ambiguously vague.
With aircraft travelling at high-speed interception, aerial dogfights would be bound to cross into Russian legal air-space. It provides Russia with further excuses that NATO was provoking not just a proxy war on Ukraine soil but a direct attack upon Mother Russia itself, an unnecessary escalation, risking total war.