Asked if the US would provide the jets, Mr Biden told reporters at the White House on Monday: “No.”
Ukraine planned to push for Western fourth-generation fighter jets such as the F-16 after securing supplies of main battle tanks last week, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister has said.
“The next big hurdle will now be the fighter jets,” Yuriy Sak, who advises Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters on Friday.
While the US has ruled out giving F-16s, other allies appear ready to entertain such a request.
French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters in The Hague on Monday that “by definition, nothing is excluded” when it comes to military assistance.
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also did not rule out a possible supply of F-16s to neighbouring Ukraine.
Joe Biden has ruled out supplying F-16s to Ukraine
/ Getty ImagesMr Biden’s comment came shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had begun exacting its revenge for Ukraine’s resistance to its invasion with relentless attacks in the east.
Mr Zelensky has warned for weeks that Moscow aims to step up its assault after about two months of virtual stalemate along the front line that stretches across the south and east.
Ukraine won a huge boost last week when Germany and the United States announced plans to provide heavy tanks, ending weeks of diplomatic deadlock on the issue.
While there was no sign of a broader new Russian offensive, the administrator of Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk province, Denis Pushilin, said Russian troops had secured a foothold in Vuhledar, a coal-mining town whose ruins have been a Ukrainian bastion since the outset of the war.
Mr Pushilin said Ukrainian forces were continuing to throw reinforcements at Bakhmut, Maryinka and Vuhledar, three towns running from north to south just west of Donetsk city. The Russian state news agency TASS quoted him as saying Russian forces were making advances there, but “not clear-cut, that is, here there is a battle for literally every metre.”
Ukraine still controls Maryinka and Vuhledar, where Russian attacks were less intense on Monday, according to Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov.
A local resident carries her baby outside of their residential building partially destroyed after a missile strike in Kharkiv on January 30
/ AFP via Getty ImagesMr Pushilin’s adviser, Yan Gagin, said fighters from Russian mercenary force Wagner had taken partial control of a supply road leading to Bakhmut, a city in Donetsk region that has been Moscow’s main focus for months.
A day earlier, the head of Wagner said his fighters had secured Blahodatne, a village just north of Bakhmut.
Kyiv said it had repelled assaults on Blahodatne and Vuhledar, and Reuters could not independently verify the situations there. But the locations of the reported fighting indicated clear, though gradual, Russian gains.
Mr Zelensky said Russian attacks in the east were relentless despite heavy casualties on the Russian side, casting the assaults as payback for Ukraine’s success in pushing Russian forces back from the capital, northeast and south earlier in the conflict.
“I think that Russia really wants its big revenge. I think they have (already) started it,” Mr Zelensky told reporters in the southern port city of Odesa.
Russian forces shelled a dozen settlements in the Bakhmut sector over the past 24 hours and trained tank, mortar and artillery fire on towns near Avdiivka to the south, the Ukrainian Army general staff said late Monday.
In central Zaporizhzhia region and in southern Kherson region, Russian forces shelled more than 40 settlements. In Kherson, the Russians shelled towns on the left bank of the Dnipro River that they abandoned in November, Kyiv said. Targets included the city of Kherson, where there were casualties.
