Warsaw and Kyiv have failed to reach an agreement on a swap of Polish MiG-29 fighter aircraft for Ukrainian drone technologies, Polish defense minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said.
Poland, which already supplied Ukraine with a large share of its MiG-29s immediately after the start of the Russian invasion in 2022, still has around a dozen such Soviet-era aircraft, according to media reports.
Amid a backdrop of weeks of diplomatic tensions over WWII-era massacres between the two neighbor allies, Kosiniak-Kamysz attributed the failure to reach an agreement to Ukraine.
Warsaw had initially indicated in December that it was ready for such an exchange.
“I had proposed a very clear approach, and I believe also a very partnership-based one: MiGs in exchange for drones,” Kosiniak-Kamysz said Monday evening on the Polish commercial television channel Polsat News.
“At first, the Ukrainians accepted it, but they did not implement it, so there will be no MiGs for Ukraine, since there are no drones or drone-related capabilities for Poland,” he added.
Relations between Warsaw and Kyiv cooled at the end of May, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) — a nationalist organization founded in 1942 and held responsible in Poland for the death of over 100,000 Poles during World War II.
In response, nationalist president Karol Nawrocki announced last week that he was withdrawing the country’s highest national distinction from his Ukrainian counterpart.
Poland continues to serve as a hub for the bulk of military and humanitarian aid deliveries to Kyiv, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk‘s pro-European government has called for a de-escalation of the row.
Warsaw — which has been modernizing its army for several years — has already largely renewed its air fleet by replacing its obsolete Soviet-era aircraft with American F-16s and South Korean FA-50s.
It is also awaiting 32 F-35 aircraft already ordered from Washington.
