The US can do what it wants with Taiwan’s decommissioned HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, the island’s defence minister has said without ruling out their transfer to Ukraine.
HAWK is a medium-range surface-to-air missile system used for air defence, which is one of Ukraine's top security needs right now.
“If the US side requests that we transfer them back to them, we will do so in accordance with the relevant regulations and return them to the US, and then the US will decide what to do with them,” Wellington Koo said while answering a reporter’s question on whether the old American weapons system could be given to Kyiv.
Taiwan no longer needs the weapon, the minister said.
His remarks come as the US and its allies prepare to supply Ukraine military aid before Joe Biden leaves as president in January and Donald Trump, who is seen as being less favourable to Kyiv, takes over.
The US and its western allies have already given Ukraine some phased-out weapons like F-16 fighter jets from the Netherlands.
Taiwan, which sees itself facing a territorial threat from China, has offered Kyiv moral support since Russia invaded in February 2022.
China considers Taiwan an integral part of its territory and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan’s leaders, however, reject Chinese sovereignty over the self-governed island.
Taiwan’s president Lai Ching-te, who is viewed as a separatist by China, has warned that an invasion of Taiwan would be worse than the Covid pandemic or the Ukraine invasion.
“Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait will have a more profound economic impact on the world than the Russia-Ukraine war and Covid,” he told a gathering of international lawmakers in Taipei in July.
“The war in Ukraine offers many important lessons for the defence of Taiwan against possible aggression by the People’s Republic of China,” according to the Institute for the Study of War.
The American think tank says China is “studying the war and drawing its own conclusions about how to prepare for future conflict in the western Pacific, and it behooves the United States, Taiwan, and our allies and partners to do the same”.
Taiwan has not made any public announcement about directly sending weapons to Ukraine.
The island is in the process of upgrading its own missile defences, announcing a deal last month to purchase the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System from the US.
The deal for the medium-range air defence system, said to have been battle tested in Ukraine, is worth upto $2bn.
