Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway have committed to supplying the largest number of the fighter jets, and groups of Ukrainian pilots have been receiving training to fly F-16s in the US, UK, France, Denmark and Romania.
With the arrival of the first batch of F-16s in Ukraine expected at any moment, Novaya Europe looked at whether the state-of-the-art aircraft will finally hand aerial superiority to the UAF or not, and heard expert concerns that the UAF simply won’t have a sufficient number of trained pilots to use the fighter jets to their full capacity.
Foreign promises
The exact number of aircraft currently at the disposal of the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF) is unknown, but The Military Balance, an open-source directory of military forces published by The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reported in early 2022 that the UAF numbered approximately 45,000 servicemen, and had 124 combat aircraft and 63 transport and specialised aircraft at its disposal.
What is clear is that the UAF stands to benefit immensely from the delivery of F-16s. The relatively weak 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive has left the nation vulnerable to Russian advances, further exacerbated by an ever-evolving set of conditions imposed by Washington on how US-supplied weapons can be used on Russian territory.
Though both militaries are experiencing shortages of armaments, munitions and soldiers, the arrival of the F-16s could, according to experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “create the conditions for a much-desired breakthrough in the war”.