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 Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Wednesday, when asked if they would be transferred to Ukraine.
The United States and its allies have provided billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine since Russia attacked the country two years ago in what Moscow calls a “special military operation”.
That has included weapons being phased out by some Western nations, like F-16 fighter jets from the Netherlands.
Koo, speaking to reporter at parliament and responding to a question on whether Taiwan’s decades-old HAWK missiles could go to Ukraine, said Taiwan no longer needed the weapons and their decommissioning was being handled in accordance with regulations.
“If the U.S. side 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, without elaborating.
Taiwan has offered strong moral support to Ukraine since the invasion, seeing parallels with the threat Taipei says it faces from its giant neighbour China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own territory.
But Taiwan has not made any public announcements about directly sending weapons to Ukraine.
Taiwan is in the process of upgrading its own missile defences, including a deal with the United States announced last month worth almost $2 billion for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) medium-range air defence solutions that includes the advanced AMRAAM Extended Range surface to air missiles.
The NASAMS system has been battle tested in Ukraine and represents a significant increase in air defence capabilities that the United States is exporting to Taiwan as demand for the system surges.
The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK system – a contrived acronym for Homing All the Way Killer – was designed in the depths of the Cold War to shoot down enemy bombers. It was refined and upgraded in the decades since then, including variants by user countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway, according to U.S. military documents.
Although the U.S. military no longer uses it, and the HAWK is considered less capable than more modern air defence systems, the most recent variants are capable of hitting targets at altitudes as low as 60 metres – a useful trait against the barrages of small, slow one-way attack drones Ukraine has faced.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; Additional reporting by Gerry Doyle; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)