KYIV – Ukraine will likely receive it first shipment of advanced F-16s in the next few days, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a phone call as Kyiv seeks to disrupt Russia’s air superiority over Ukrainian skies amid continued battles on December 23 in the east and south of the country.
“Today, I informed President Zelenskiy of our government’s decision to prepare an initial 18 F-16 fighter aircraft for delivery to Ukraine,” Rutte said late on December 22 in a post on social media platform X.
I wouldn’t drive hype either but those F-16s are some serious capability. Not really so much because they would be that much better airframes as what Ukrainians are already flying but because they can carry a metric fuckton of different NATO armaments that are currently sitting in warehouses that can’t be shipped to Ukraine because Ukraine wouldn’t be able to throw them at Russia, or only with questionable effectiveness – say, those air-to-air IRIS-T that Germany is sending over: They integrate into IRIS-T air defence but launched from the ground they’re very short-range1. Having F16 means that Ukrainians can also strap them to planes, with system integration close to that of an Eurofighter.
1 they don’t care about launch orientation at all, that’s their point you can launch them in the opposite direction upside down while spinning heavily and they’ll still find their target. But the air-to-air variants just carry less fuel