Weeks before the Russian attack on Ukraine, several governments of NATO member countries, such as the British, the Estonian or the Polish, sent weapons to Ukraine. So it was a simple operation. The British press had details of how military cargo planes they flew from a base south of London to Kiev, unloaded and returned.
As of February 24, it was impossible to ship directly to Ukraine by plane, so that material began to land in Poland.
The operation gained scope when the European Union approved a few days after the attack use 450 million euros of Community funds to buy and ship these weapons to Ukraine. From then on, practically every European government loaded planes and flew to Poland.
It is one of the largest operations ever organized to arm a country already in the midst of a war. And it can be followed live in computer applications such as FlightRadar24 if the flight number is known.
US soldiers at the Rzeszow base in Poland before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photo EFE
hot border
The operation focuses on a small regional airport in Poland, in Rzeszow, about 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. The shipments have been so many that the Polish press reported how last Saturday some of these flights had to be diverted to other airports because there was no space to land.
Witnesses to the transfer, like some newspaper correspondents, say that they have seen military truck convoys, escorted by Polish police, heading for the Ukrainian border. But there are also testimonies of other trucks crossing not through the usual border crossings but entering Ukraine through rural roads far from the eyes of the curious.
The main road connection between Poland and Ukraine, which leads to the Ukrainian city of Lviv, it is also the main outlet for Ukrainian refugees.
Military vehicles near Rzeszow, Poland. Photo EFE
The movement of heavy vehicles of the Polish Armed Forces is constant around this facility, where its 21st logistics battalion resides and yesterday curious onlookers multiplied camera in hand and also ‘spotter’, aircraft hunters, to whom two plainclothes policemen they make an effort to warn that they cannot take photos, say the envoys of the Spanish newspaper ABC.
It’s hard to hold back, there are two imposing Black Hawk helicopters in front of them with their rotors turning and just touching down and that soon begin to take off.
key path
NATO has to bring its weapons through Poland (or Hungary or Slovakia) because doing so by air would run the risk of having to face cargo planes against Russian fighter-bombers and because the Ukrainian Black Sea coast is now under Russian control.
The movement of heavy vehicles of the Polish Armed Forces is constant around this facility. Photo EFE
But road shipments they face a race against the clock for fear that Russia will advance and cut off the roads from Ukraine’s western borders to Kiev and other parts of the country.
Poland and the United States are now discussing how they could send dozens of Soviet-made fighters, MIG-29, in the Polish arsenals. They are planes that Ukrainian pilots know how to fly, unlike Western planes.
The solution, which does not come to fruition, would be for Poland to hand them over to the United States at the US base in Ramstein (Germany), for the United States to send them to Ukraine with Ukrainian pilots. In exchange, Washington would compensate Poland with second-hand F-18s.