World Blog by humble servant.Ukraine Chronicles 129.Turkey rejects Ukraine ‘precondition’ to receive weapons from US Ankara says its removal from Washington’s fighter jet program was “unlawful”

Fahrettin Altun, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman, has shot down the idea that Ankara should transfer its Russian-made S-400 air defense missile systems to Ukraine in exchange for Turkey receiving F-35 warplanes and Patriot missile batteries from the US. Kiev has been pleading for foreign aid to help it fight off the Russian military offensive. “It is the responsibility of the West and especially the US to normalize relations with Turkey,” Altun wrote in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Wednesday. He added that “what the West must do is deliver the F-35 fighter jets and Patriot batteries to Turkey without preconditions.” The spokesman wrote that Washington’s removal of Turkey from the F-35 program in 2019 was “unlawful.” The US refused to deliver the promised planes after Ankara rejected its demand to scrap the purchase of S-400s. Altun was responding to a Wall Street Journal op-ed from last week, which asked Ankara to give its S-400s to Kiev so they can use them to shoot down Russian aircraft. Paul Kolbe, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and former CIA operative, wrote that Turkey could get the now-dead F-35 shipment from the US “back on track,” as well Patriot batteries as a “nice new American replacement” for the S-400s. Kolbe further argued it would be “symbolic” for Russian-made missiles to destroy Russian planes