Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, is in Slovakia for a meeting of NATO ministers and has just held a press conference at which he reiterated and further explained why the US will not support imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine to hold off Russian air attacks, writes The Guardian.

“We’ve sent additional US forces to reinforce our NATO allies and we have more on call, ready to go if NATO activates its response forces … to enhance Europe’s defenses…

From a US perspective … President Biden has been clear that we would not have US forces fighting in Ukraine. Having said that we will do everything in our power to support Ukraine ... [but] enforcing a no-fly zone means that you are in combat, you are in a fight with Russia and that’s one of the things we have said, our president has said we are not going to do.

So what this really means is that in order to control the skies you have to shut down the air defenses that are on the ground, and some of those air defense systems are in Russia and so again there is no easy or simple way to do this.

There is no such thing as a no-fly zone “lite”, a no-fly zone means that you are in a conflict with Russia. So from a US perspective, our position remains that we are not going to do that”, - he said