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

The latter fit well with Ukraine’s existing arsenal because those 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 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.

At the start of a visit to the three Baltic states that are NATO members, 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 will 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 been facing off against Russian-backed separatists in the region for years are also well trained to fight in Donbas.

But fresh weapons deliveries and familiarity with terrain do not mean Ukrainian forces will have an easy time against Russian troops that have 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.”

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

Other Western nations have also moved to deliver more sophisticated weapons…