TAIPEI (Reuters) – It is up to the United States to decide what to do with Taiwan's decommissioned HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, the island's Defense Minister Wellington Koo said on Wednesday, when asked whether they would be transferred to Ukraine .
The United States and its allies have supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons since Russia attacked the country two years ago in what Moscow calls a “special military operation.”
That included the phasing out of weapons by some Western countries, such as F-16 fighter jets from the Netherlands.
Koo, speaking to a reporter in parliament and responding to a question about whether Taiwan's decades-old HAWK missiles could go to Ukraine, said that Taiwan no longer needed the weapons and that their dismantling would be in accordance with regulations was handled.
“If the US requests that we transfer them back to them, we will do so in accordance with the relevant regulations and return them to the United States, and then the United States will decide what to do with them,” he said . to work out.
Taiwan has offered strong moral support to Ukraine since the invasion, drawing parallels to the threat Taipei says it faces from its giant neighbor China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own territory.
But Taiwan has made no public announcements about sending weapons directly to Ukraine.
Taiwan is upgrading its own missile defenses, including an agreement announced last month with the United States worth nearly $2 billion for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS), medium-range air defense solutions including the advanced AMRAAM. Extended Range Surface-to-Air Missiles.
The NASAMS system has been put through its paces in Ukraine and represents a significant increase in the air defense capabilities the United States is exporting to Taiwan as demand for the system increases.
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK system – a made-up acronym for Homing All the Way Killer – was designed in the depths of the Cold War to take down enemy bombers. It was refined and upgraded in the decades that followed, including variants by user countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, according to U.S. military documents.
Although the US military no longer uses it and the HAWK is considered less capable than more modern air defense systems, the most recent variants are capable of hitting targets at a height of just 60 meters – a useful attribute against the barrage of small , slow air defense systems. one-way attack drones that Ukraine has had to deal with.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; additional reporting by Gerry Doyle; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
