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 if they would be transferred to Ukraine.

The United States and its allies have supplied billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine since Russia attacked the country two years ago in what Moscow calls a “special military operation.”

This includes the gradual withdrawal of weapons by some Western countries, such as the Netherlands’ F-16 fighter jets.

Koo, speaking to a reporter in Parliament and responding to a question about whether Taiwan’s decades-old HAWK missiles could be sent to Ukraine, said Taiwan no longer needs the weapons and their decommissioning was managed in accordance with regulations.

“If the U.S. side requests that we return them, we will do so in accordance with existing regulations and send them back 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 neighbor China, which claims the democratically governed island as its own territory.

But Taiwan has made no public announcement about directly sending weapons to Ukraine.

Taiwan is modernizing its own missile defenses, including a deal with the United States announced last month worth nearly $2 billion for medium-range air defense solutions for the National Advanced Missile System ground-to-air (NASAMS), which includes advanced AMRAAM. Extended-range surface-to-air missiles.

The NASAMS system was combat tested in Ukraine and represents a significant increase in air defense capabilities that the United States is exporting to Taiwan as demand for this system increases.

The Raytheon MIM-23 HAWK system – an artificial acronym for Homing All the Way Killer – was designed in the depths of the Cold War to shoot down enemy bombers. It has been refined and improved over the decades since, including variations by user nations 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, newer variants are capable of hitting targets at altitudes as low as 60 meters – a useful feature against barrages of small, slow missiles. one-way attack drones that Ukraine faced.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; additional reporting by Gerry Doyle; editing by Lincoln Feast.)