‘We will get F-16s’: Ukraine aims for NATO’s fighter jets after winning battle for Western tanks

The dust has barely settled on the decision by the U.S. and Germany to supply battle tanks to Ukraine, but talk has already turned to the possible use of other firepower, namely, fighter jets.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed his gratitude to Kyiv’s allies Wednesday regarding the sending of tanks, but said he had asked NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for more assistance.

“We have to unlock the supply of long-range missiles to Ukraine, it is important for us to expand our cooperation in artillery, we have to achieve the supply of aircraft to Ukraine. And this is a dream. And this is a task,” he said in his nightly address.

Ukraine has made no secret of the fact that it would like to receive fighter jets — such as the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a multirole fighter aircraft developed for the U.S. Air Force — from its allies to help it fight Russia.

Kyiv appears confident that, as with Western tanks, it will eventually be given F-16s too.

“We will get F-16s,” Yuriy Sak, an advisor to Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told CNBC Thursday.

Sak said Kyiv expected there to be a similar approach to the tanks issue — essentially allies reluctant to give Ukraine fighter jets before an eventual agreement to do so, but said there was a hope that, in this case, the decision will be faster. “We hope that there will be no same mistakes, because we will get the F-16s,” he said.

“At the moment more than 50 countries around the world have this platform. I don’t see a reason, or any rational explanation, why Ukraine shouldn’t be getting F-16s or other fourth generation jet fighters,” he added.

The U.S. has been tight-lipped about giving Ukraine F-16s, or allowing other countries to re-export their own U.S.-made fighter jets to Ukraine (National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he had no announcement to make on the issue Wednesday). But there has been some receptiveness to the idea in Europe with the Netherlands stating last week that it would look into supplying F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine if the government in Kyiv submitted a request.

How helpful fighter jets would be to Ukraine is a matter for debate, and depends on the aircraft, its weaponry and flying conditions, experts note.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for Airpower and Military Technology at the RUSI think tank in London, said on Twitter Monday that Ukraine’s Air Force “would absolutely benefit greatly from Western fighters in terms of air-to-air and (potentially) air-to-ground lethality. But there are caveats,” he noted:

“Any Western fighters that could plausibly be sent would still be at high risk from Russian SAMs [surface-to-air missiles], so would have to fly at very low altitudes within several tens of kilometres of the frontlines. This would dramatically reduce effective missile range and limit strike options,” he noted.

This meant, he said that while Western fighter jets “would offer Ukraine an improved capability to destroy fixed Russian targets near the frontlines from a safer distance, they would be adding to existing strike options like HIMARS and drawing from limited stockpiles.”