Soviet military aircraft are living out their last years in Ukraine. Another confirmation of this was the proposal to equip the Air Force of this country with F-16 fighters. What are the chances that Ukrainian pilots will fly in American cars, what price will Ukraine have to pay for this decision – and what threat will these cars pose to Russia?
Grand sale: The United States is offering its already battered F-16 fighter jets around the world. Now the turn came to Ukraine, which also received an offer to buy cars. Earlier, these aircraft" according to NATO standards " were literally imposed on Bulgaria and Romania, also to replace Soviet-style machines.
The offer made to Ukraine by the American company Lockheed Martin on the sale of a batch of F-16 fighters has not yet caused a response. However, earlier at the level of the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, similar ideas have already been voiced, and it is clear why.
The Ukrainian Air Force was created on the remains of aviation units stationed on its territory since Soviet times. Today, they have a list of about 210 aircraft and under a hundred combat aircraft, including front-line Su-24 bombers, Su-25 attack aircraft, Su-27 heavy interceptor fighters and light front-line MiG-29 fighters (originally there were 1,100).
Not all of them are able to fly purely for technical reasons (wear is more than 50%). In addition, as the experience of combat operations in the Donbass has shown, "letaki" (aircraft) suffered significant damage from portable air defense systems and refused to fly into the area of the defeat of the militia MANPADS.
If we talk about the Ukrainian fighters that are available, but not the fact that they are able to make sorties, there are not so many of them. Approximately 30 Su-27s and MiG-29s each. None of them has received any serious modernization over the past years – and even more so further development in the form of the construction of new aircraft.
In other words, today, due to physical wear and tear (resource exhaustion), the fighter aviation of Ukraine is living out its last years. Ukraine does not produce cars of this class independently and is not capable of producing them. For obvious reasons, neither spare parts nor components for the MiG-29 and Su-27 are supplied from Russia to Ukraine (at least officially). Plans to replace Soviet-made combat vehicles with Western fighters were announced two years ago by the head of the Ukrainian Air Force, Sergei Drozdov.
"Our pilots would dream of flying such planes," Drozdov said. Yes, but he also complained after a while that this pleasure is expensive-billions of dollars, and therefore these dreams are practically impossible.
Viktor Sokirko
