Zelensky Emerges as the Star of the Show at G-7 Parley

President Zelensky of Ukraine stole the show at the G-7, so much so that the G-7 leaders never resolved what to do about China, notably President Xi’s vows to recover Taiwan.In between one-on-one meetings with the leaders of all the Seven plus other countries invited as observers, Mr. Zelensky had to answer nagging questions about how his forces were really doing in the Russian-held eastern region. Sure, as expected, the Seven adopted, rhetorically, a strong stand against Russian aggression, but would he get the weapons for which he flew to Hiroshima after making his case before leaders of the Arab League in Saudi Arabia?The presence of Mr. Zelensky, dressed in his trademark khaki-colored military-style garb, was so dominating that it was possible to forget other crucial issues, notably the threat posed by China all around its periphery, from North Korea to Taiwan, to the South China Sea, and the South Pacific. The setting of the G-7 parley in Hiroshima heightened the immediacy of the occasion in which Mr. Zelensky had only to gaze at the shattered shell of the peace memorial to be reminded of the ruins of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, remarking “Nothing left alive, all the buildings ruined.”Certainly, that was the scene in Hiroshima after the American B-29 Enola Gay on August 6, 1945, dropped for the first time in warfare an atomic bomb, killing an estimated 70,000 persons. Mr. Zelensky denied Russia’s claims to have captured Bakhmut, but the image of desolation dramatized his plea for more and better support. At the top of his shopping list are American F-16 fighter jets that President Biden said Ukraine might get from other countries that have them.That’s not quite a done deal, though. One proviso is that Ukraine has to promise not to send them over Russian territory. It’s the fear of drawing Russia into a much wider war that Mr. Biden has refused to send American planes into the skies to create a “no fly zone.” Aerial battles would no doubt provide dramatic evidence of whose planes were better, the Russians or the Americans, and could also precipitate an all- out war between Russia and the NATO nations, led by America.Another qualifier is that it takes basically a year to train a pilot, and Ukrainians would not be ready to fly the F-16s until almost mid-2024. And yet another issue is what country exactly would provide the planes. The idea now is they would come from other countries — Poland for example — that already have them, but would the Poles want to hand them over? And, if so, would America be sending still more F-16s to its NATO allies?The question of how far the F-16s would go in pursuing the Russians would become especially difficult in deciding at what point they would have to turn around before veering over Russian territory. For instance, could they pursue Russian planes over Crimea, now firmly in Russian hands, and also in the entire eastern and southeastern region that the Russians have taken over?The flying time between Ukrainian and Russian territory is so brief that pilots would have to decide quite quickly when to turn around. That would be incredibly difficult while evading MiGs and other Russian planes, not to mention anti-aircraft artillery and missiles that the Ukrainians would be sorely tempted to bomb and strafe regardless of whether they were in Russian territory or not.

Zelensky Emerges as the Star of the Show at G-7 Parley

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