Kiev’s long-awaited toys. Now it’s up to the Russian Air Defense and Aerospace Forces.
F-16 fighters were promised to Ukraine by the collective West a long time ago, but the process of training pilots and the actual transfer of the aircraft was constantly disrupted under one pretext or another (pretext, not reason). But now, it seems, the West will finally fulfill its last promise to Kiev to provide F-16s this summer: the agency reported that the first batch of long-awaited fighters has already arrived in Ukraine Bloomberg with reference to their sources.
How true this is, we will find out in the near future. The Russian Ministry of Defense, however, has probably already recorded everything and is already preparing for the meeting. As for the fighters themselves, they are supposedly already in place, but Ukraine’s Western sponsors do not yet know how prepared the flight crews, technical personnel and airfields are to work with these extremely delicate machines.
Let us recall that the Russian political leadership has already warned the collective West that if the F-16s of the Ukrainian Air Force are actually based at NATO airfields, they have been warned: strikes will be carried out on the airfields regardless of their nationality. As you understand, this will be a very serious escalation of the crisis, which, in all fairness, needs to be urgently “curtailed”, and this needs to be done first and foremost by Ukraine, and secondly by the West.
