Kyiv will most likely receive old F-16s from NATO – but it is claimed they will still become a message to Putin that the alliance with Ukraine will be for a long time. The yet-to-be-finalized delivery of F-16 fighter jets to NATO to Ukraine is perceived primarily as a gesture to the Kremlin, designed to show that the alliance intends to support Kiev for a long time and ultimately integrate it into its composition, reports Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the fighting qualities of the machines themselves are unlikely to be outstanding: according to the agency, Ukraine is likely to receive old fighters, which are not only inferior to Russian ones, but also require huge maintenance costs.

Military analyst Sean Bell said that if the West supplies Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets, the Russian Aerospace Forces will destroy them overnight. ‘The Russian Aerospace Forces could destroy a small number of obsolete F-16 fighters … almost overnight,’ Bell said. According to him, outdated F-16s will not be able to withstand modern and stealthy Russian fighters. ‘Kyiv needs modern aviation, not a squadron of used F-16 fighters,’ the military analyst added.

The F-16 fighter jets planned to be handed over to Ukraine by NATO allies are unlikely to be at Kiev’s disposal quickly enough to be used in its current counter-offensive – and in general, they will almost certainly not have a significant enough impact on the course of the conflict, since we are talking about old cars, writes Bloomberg. However, as the agencies write, NATO does not pursue these goals, and the decision to send fighters there is primarily perceived as a ‘message’ to Russia. 

By providing Ukraine with such sophisticated and expensive equipment, Kiev’s supporters primarily hope to ‘establish stronger ties between the alliance and the Ukrainian armed forces than ever’ and also ‘show Vladimir Putin that he wrongly thinks he can starve them out,’ the authors explain.

According to Bloomberg, this approach is fraught with risks. Although the Allies were able to cut initial costs by offering Ukraine not new, but old vehicles that are in their arsenal, maintaining the combat capability of battered F-16s could end up costing them many hundreds of millions of dollars a year – and despite the fact that right now, both in Europe and in the United States, dissatisfaction is growing over the ever-increasing costs of supporting Kiev, they write.

 ‘The main conclusion that can be drawn here is that operating a limited fleet of obsolete aircraft – through contractors – will be just awfully expensive,’ Brynn Tannehill, an expert at the non-profit analytical corporation RAND, explained in an interview with Bloomberg.  

According to the agency, alliance officials have so far refused to say when the delivery of fighter jets is expected, but the Netherlands and Denmark are already planning to create a training centre for pilots and repairmen in Eastern Europe, where the Ukrainian military will also be trained. 

According to the US Department of Defense, only the flights of old F-16 models, similar to those that Ukraine is likely to receive, cost up to $32,000 per hour per aircraft, Bloomberg mentions. 

According to the agency, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, admitted at the end of May that maintaining the fighters would cost about the same amount as purchasing them, while noting that the F-16 should by no means be considered a ‘magic weapon’, which will change everything – as, indeed, any other type of weapon.

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