How can a country supply weapons to another ally country and not be considered to be involved in that war?
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Weapons don’t kill people, people kill people.
Supplying weapons doesn’t hurt the other side, lots of people in the Us have lots of weapons and most of them don’t shoot each other most of the time.
It’s like you are asking your friend to hit a guy you are fighting with a stick. But if your friend does, your rival will reach for his gun and slug you both. So your friend throws a stick to you and hopes you know how to swing it.
Weapons are transferred between countries all the time, sometimes another country can try to restrict supplies going into another country, but since it is part of normal activity they can do it without being specifically involved in that county.
It depends on what a country considers an act of war.
Would you declare war if a third country gave humanitarian aid to civilians? Most likely not.
How about supplying helmets to enemy soldiers? Well, they’re helping the enemy but it’s not that big of a deal.
Weapons? Well, they’re getting close to pissing you off…
Fighter jets and bombers? Prepare for war!
Countries sell arms all the time
It’s actually very hard to find a military that *doesn’t* use arms produced by the US or Russia.
Selling weapons by itself isn’t considered an act of war.
It is not unusual for countries to buy foreign weapons. And traditionally war does not directly impact trade. The price of those weapons is up for negotiations as usual with any commodity. Weapons itself is only just one of the necessary tools for war. You also need men, military equipment, food, fuel and such. So in general weapons have been allowed to be traded even during war. However donating weapons is on the boarder of what is allowed. Even though this is technically within what we consider legal many countries have ended up involved in a war for just trading weapons at market value.
This is currently the primary argument against donating weapons to Ukraine as it is possible that Russia might retaliate for this. For example the news currently have been about the MIG fighters in service with the Polish military. They wanted to donate them to Ukraine as they were getting new F-35 airplanes to replace them but does not want to be left without fighters. So the US came out and promised them F-16 airplanes if Poland donates their MIGs to Ukraine. The Ukrainian pilots is not trained to fly F-16 themselves. But Poland does not want to give such advanced weapons to Ukraine themselves so they agree to the US proposals but instead of giving the MIGs to Ukraine they will give them to the US. But the US does not want to give fighters to Ukraine either so refuses the deal. So currently everyone agrees that the MIGs should be donated to Ukraine but nobody wants to be the ones actually giving them because they fear Putin is going to retaliate against whoever donates the fighters.
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