TAIPEI (Reuters) – It is as much as the United States to resolve what to do with Taiwan’s decommissioned HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, Defense Minister Wellington Koo mentioned on Wednesday, when requested whether or not they can be transferred to Ukraine.
The United States and its allies have provided billions of {dollars}’ value of weapons to Ukraine since Russia attacked the nation two years in the past in what Moscow calls a “particular army operation.”
This has included the phasing out of weapons by some Western nations, such because the Netherlands’ F-16 fighter jets.
Koo, chatting with a reporter in parliament and responding to a query about whether or not Taiwan’s decades-old HAWK missiles may very well be fired at Ukraine, mentioned Taiwan now not wants the weapons and that their dismantling is being dealt with in compliance with laws.
“If the United States asks us to return them, we are going to achieve this in accordance with related laws and return them to the United States, after which the United States will resolve what to do with them,” he mentioned, with out elaborating.
Taiwan has provided robust ethical assist to Ukraine for the reason that invasion, seeing parallels with the risk Taipei says it faces from its big neighbor, China, which claims the democratically ruled island as its personal territory.
But Taiwan has made no public announcement about straight sending weapons to Ukraine.
Taiwan is within the strategy of boosting its missile defenses, together with a take care of the United States introduced final month value almost $2 billion for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) medium-range air protection options which embrace the superior AMRAAM Extended Range Surface-to-Air Missile.
The NASAMS system has been battle-tested in Ukraine and represents a major improve in air protection capabilities that the United States is exporting to Taiwan as demand for the system will increase.
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK system – a contrived acronym for Homing All the Way Killer – was designed within the depths of the Cold War to shoot down enemy bombers. According to US army paperwork, it was refined and up to date over the next a long time, together with variants by person international locations similar to Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway.
Although the US Army now not makes use of it and the HAWK is taken into account much less highly effective than extra fashionable air protection programs, newer variants are able to hitting targets at altitudes as much as 60 meters – a helpful function towards barrages of small and sluggish one-way assault drones that Ukraine confronted.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; Additional reporting by Gerry Doyle; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
