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Well, that didn’t take long.

On Friday, January 27, The Hill reported that a “breakthrough” has been reached on sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine following an agreement on acquiring battle tanks from Germany and the USG.

“Hopeful signs,” the newspaper reports. “The supplying of jets seems much less unlikely after the Biden administration made a major U-turn by agreeing to send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has performed a re-run. He supposedly opposed sending battle tanks, then said he would if the USG “went first,” sort of like a dare between grade school boys. Scholz eventually buckled and agreed to send his Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.

“There will be no fighter jet deliveries to Ukraine. This was made clear very early, including from the U.S. President,” Scholz said when he went back on his word and agreed to the demand tanks be sent, pronto.

Now Scholz’s word is worth squat.

USG neocons—such as Senators Richard Blumenthal, Sheldon Whitehouse, and the ever-bellicose and apparently criminally insane, Lindsay Graham—are celebrating escalation.

“The combination of tanks, fighter aircraft, and ATACMS will help Ukraine confront the upcoming Russian offensive and go on offense in both the east and the south in an attempt to further erode Russia’s capability to continue fighting in Ukraine. Let’s give the Ukrainians everything they need to win—now,” the trio declared in a statement.

The Hill believes sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine will “not likely… be seen as more of an escalation.”

I’m sure Putin and the Russians would disagree with that.

Meanwhile, there is news indicating Ukrainian pilots are already training to fly F-16s. Colonel Yuriy Ignat, the spokesman of the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, spilled the beans. Said Ignat on January 24 (machine translation):

Our military pilots went to the United States, funds were allocated for the training of our pilots… In other words, the aviation topic never left the agenda, — said the representative of the Air Force. — The type of aircraft, which is likely to be provided to Ukraine, and the corresponding terms of training (personnel. —  Ed. ) have already been determined. (Emphasis added.)

In addition to flight crews, according to Ignat, the USG is also training aviation engineers.

The decision to train Ukrainian pilots, however, was made last July, although it was not widely reported. “The House approved $100 million in funding to train Ukrainian pilots to use U.S. aircraft as part of the National Defense Authorization Act it passed 329-101 this week,” DefenseNews reported.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., told Defense News he has been in touch with the Kyiv on the matter and that he added the $100 million for training as an amendment to the defense authorization bill this week in order to facilitate an eventual shift of Ukraine’s military hardware away from Soviet-era technology.

The neocon and neolib “representatives” of the ill-informed masses of America have made it clear aging MiG-29s delivered to Poland from Ramstein Air Base in Germany will not be sufficient to bolster the impossible dream of destroying the Russian army, that is to say, short of nukes.

F-16s will not stop the Russian SMO in Ukraine. I guess Lindsay Graham, distracted by his fevered dreams of killing Russians and bombing Moscow, has not heard about Russia’s Prometheus (S-500 Prometey) hypersonic anti-aircraft weapon.

The S-500 is capable of detecting and simultaneously engaging up to 10 ballistic hypersonic targets flying at a speed of 5 kilometers per second, according to TASS.

This rate of speed is a problem for the F-16. It begins to rattle and threaten to come apart at Mach 1.6, according to a post at Business Insider. However, supersonic speeds are no match for a missile traveling at Mach 5 and above. This is five times the speed of sound, approximately 3,705 miles per hour.

Turkey tested a previous generation of Russian S-400 missiles against F-16s. “Why would Ankara test the S-400 it bought from Russia against its own F-16s, unless it was at the behest of Moscow, wanting to see how it performed?” speculated The Jerusalem Post in 2020.

It’s not a difficult question to answer. Russia is to be nixed as a competitor.

If I can download and read a RAND corporation PDF, so can Russia. The document in question? “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.”

According to the document’s “research brief,”

A team of RAND experts developed economic, geopolitical, ideological, informational, and military options and qualitatively assessed them in terms of their likelihood of success in extending Russia, their benefits, and their risks and costs.

In other words, the idea here is to destroy Russia, turn it into an impoverished backwater (as it was in the 19th century), and “strategically” malnourish, starve, and condemn its people to misery and an early death. In short, a repeat of the 1990s, only this time on steroids.

“The report notes that Russia has ‘deep-seated’ anxieties about western interference and potential military attack,” writes Rick Sterling for Al Mayadeen, an independent Arab satellite news channel.

No doubt. The average Russian is reminded every May 9 of the huge sacrifice the Russian people made in the successful yet expensive effort to push the Wehrmacht out of Russia and in turn march the Red Army westward to Berlin.

Such memories of horrible suffering were undoubtedly rekindled when it was announced German battle tanks with the German iron cross (Balkenkreuz) would be sent to neo-nazis in Ukraine.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author