France will transfer Mirage fighters to the Ukrainian army. Macron: “We will train pilots”

With Biden on D-Day, support for Kiev against Moscow was also reiterated

ROME – French President Emmanuel Macron has announced that France will transfer Mirage 2000-5 fighter planes to the Ukrainian army. “Tomorrow we will launch a new cooperation” said the head of the Hexagon in television speech yesterday evening, on the occasion of the commemorations for the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings in 1944. Then, he added that Paris is also ready to train Ukrainian pilots directly in France”. As Kyiv Independent clarifies, these are the same class of warplanes as the F-16s produced in the United States, and which are also supplied to other countries such as Holland, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. President Joe Biden took advantage of D-Day – as the day of the Normandy landings is defined – to reaffirm support for Ukraine: “It is unthinkable to surrender to bullies and bow to dictators. To do so would mean forgetting what happened here,” Biden added in his speech at the American cemetery in the French region.

“If we were to do so, it would mean forgetting what happened here, on these sacred beaches”.
The Ukrainian press meanwhile reports an attack that Ukrainian forces carried out with American weapons against a Russian target in Crimean peninsula. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as reported on Ukrinform, said that “last night the defense forces launched an attack with Atacms missiles (of US production, ed.) on the Kerch sea crossing point” which “is actively employed by the enemy to support its troops in the temporarily occupied Crimea” with food and military supplies, which also reach southern Ukraine. The attack, as reported by the Kyiv Independent, occurred on May 30, but only today did Ukrainian sources report it.

In the note, the General Staff also states that it “significantly damaged two merchant ships” and this would have paralyzed the crossing, “seriously compromising” the Russian military logistics chain. The Kerch crossing is located on the eastern edge of the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, and is separated by sea from Russia’s Krasnodar Krai region. Russia claims sovereignty after the 2014 conflict, but neither Western countries nor the United Nations recognize it. However, the target hit may be considered by Moscow to be an attack on its own territory, especially considering the fact that in the second half of May the United States authorized the Kiev government to use the weapons supplied by the White House to strike bases Russian militarys, thus circumventing the ban on the use of NATO armaments against Moscow. However, Washington has specified that any attacks must reach the Russian bases from which the bombings on Karkhiv start. Last weekend – on June 1st or 2nd – the Kyiv army struck a Russian military base in Belgorod, from where the raids on Karkhiv departed, destroying anti-aircraft systems using American Himars missiles. This derogation was initially proposed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, which was joined not only by the United States, but also by France and Germany, and which was not opposed by the European Union.< /p>