Sean Penn calls for billionaire to step up and buy aircraft for Ukraine

The Hollywood actor Sean Penn has called for a billionaire to come forward and buy two squadrons of F-15 or F-16 aircraft for Ukraine in an unlikely attempt to tip the scales against the Russian invaders in the five-week-old war.

Although the role of arms middleman may be one to which Penn is not obviously suited, he has been engaged in filming a documentary about Ukraine and its charismatic president, Volodymyr Zelenksiy, for months.

The Oscar-winning star of Milk and Mystic River was in Kyiv on the day the war broke out, pictured in the front row of a press briefing in the capital city, and met a tired-looking president later that day, according to an Instagram story released by Zelenskiy.

Ukraine has been asking for more fighters since the war started, but the US refused to support a deal that could have seen Poland supply 28 MiG-29s, a Russian-made jet of the type its remaining pilots are used to flying. Washington was concerned that supplying fighter jets could be deemed escalatory by a nuclear-armed Russia.

Experts said it would normally take pilots up to four months to learn how to fly a new fighter, and Ukraine would also have the problem of finding spare parts and engineers who knew how to maintain Boeing and Lockheed Martin-made aircraft.