Air raid sirens sounded again across Ukraine on Thursday morning. Ultimately, the anti-aircraft guns managed to shoot down 47 of the 55 missiles. But strong explosions were still heard in Kiev and there is already at least one dead and several injured.
“You could have expected the Kremlin to make itself known one way or another,” Hammelburg says. He refers to the agreement between the United States and several European countries to send tanks to the front. It feels a lot like revenge. Especially since it was not the front that was targeted, but large cities such as Kiev and Kharkov”.
Surprisingly, some hypersonic Kinzhal missiles were fired for the first time during the attack. “We’d heard a lot about them, but we hadn’t seen them yet,” Hammelburg said. “Those missiles can fly two thousand kilometers away at many times the speed of sound. They are very difficult to shoot in the air.
Non-taboo combat aircraft
Meanwhile, discussions are raging in Europe and the United States about whether to go one step further and supply fighter aircraft to Ukraine. Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra has already said that delivering F-16s shouldn’t be taboo. Although the problem is that the Ukrainian Air Force is not trained to fly those planes.
According to Hammelburg, the F-16s would then not go to the front, but would go to a former Eastern Bloc country, such as Poland or the Czech Republic. Those countries still have MIG fighter planes that the Ukrainians can handle. They can then hand them over to Kiev and replace them with the same F-16s.
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