Air Force Official: Ukraine to Protect Its F-16 Fighter Fleet by Basing Planes ‘in Other Countries’

Ukraine’s soon-to-be-operational fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft will protect itself from Kremlin attacks by ensconcing some combat aircraft in third-party countries Russia is unlikely to strike, Brigadier General Serhiy Holubtsov, Ukrainian Air Force Chief of Aviation, said in a Sunday interview.

“There is a number of aircraft that will go to Ukraine. There are a certain number of aircraft that will be stored at secure air bases, outside of Ukraine, so that they are not targeted here. And this will be our reserve in case of need for replacement of faulty planes during routine maintenance,” he said. “That is, so that we can constantly have a certain number of aircraft in the operational inventory, which will correspond to the number of pilots we have. When there will be more pilots – there will be more planes in Ukraine.”

The Washington-supported Radio Liberty news agency published the interview in Ukrainian. Holubstov’s wide-ranging remarks closely followed recent reports in Beltway media that the expected deployment of US-made F-16 fighters will be small-scale and unlikely to affect the progress of the air war in Ukraine in the short or medium term.

Ukrainian military analysts have widely predicted that Kyiv is unlikely to attempt to operate more than four or six F-16s initially, only in low-risk missions. The most likely NATO facilities to support the Ukrainian jets are in Poland, for maintenance, and Romania, for operations.

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Holubtsov did not offer details on the degree to which, if at all, Ukrainian-flown F-16s sent into combat against Russian forces would receive base support from NATO facilities. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on June 5 said the Kremlin would strike NATO personnel in Ukraine if they were assisting Kyiv in attacks against Russian forces.

On June 6, following a rare Ukrainian air strike using a US-made munition against a target in mainland Russia, President Vladimir Putin said the Kremlin would retaliate “asymmetrically” to punish Washington for helping Kyiv carry out the attack. On Monday Andrei Kartapolov, Chairman of the Defense Committee in the Russian parliament, told the state-controlled news agency RIA Novosti that Russia would strike the Ukrainian F-16s wherever they were, if they were used to attack the Russian Federation.

“If they will not be used for their main (military) purpose, then they won't be targeted. But if they participate in combat missions then, unconditionally, they will be targets. Including the airfields on which they would be based, with all the implications necessarily following from that,” the Russian legislator Kartapolov said.

Holubstov said early F-16 combat operations will be limited and tentative, with the main objective being working out how to operate the aircraft usefully, without placing it and inexperienced air and ground crew in jeopardy. Flight operations will initially be in airspace far away from probable Russian intercepts, he said.

“It’s like this: crawl, walk, run. We haven’t learned to crawl yet. The planes will arrive, we will understand that we will go somewhere deep in the country, we will try to see what these planes can do, we will learn, we will get used to it, we will work in airspace that is relatively safe. Then we will go further. And when we learn to walk, then we’ll run,” Holubtsov said. “After that will come the third stage – leveraging an advantage.”

Holubstov said the Ukrainian F-16s will be armed with the US-manufactured AIM-120 missile with an open-source range of 180+ km, and Ukrainian pilots hunting Russian aircraft or drones “certainly will find targets,” he said.

He implied that the main role for the Ukrainian F-16s in air defense will be to serve as a piece of the national air defense network along with ground-based systems like the powerful US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile, with the missions of protecting Ukrainian airspace and degrading Russian capacity to fly at selected locations.

“Now, together with the Patriot, if the F-16 is operational, we expect the same effect (degradation of Russian air operations and possibly Russian aircraft abandonment of some air space). They (Russian Air Force planners) will understand that they are being shot down and will change their tactics, or even refuse to use aviation in some areas,” Holubtsov said.

Planning on using the F-16s for ground strikes is going forward, Holubstov said. F-16-delivered cruise missile strikes will be more effective than in the past, he said, because a NATO-standard cruise missile like the French SCALP or British Storm Shadow is pre-designed to integrate with the F-16’s electronics, allowing a pilot to program a target for the missile in flight, enabling airborne re-tasking or attacks on pop-up ground targets, especially those that are mobile.

Ukrainian engineers in 2023 were able to jury-rig Su-24 and MiG-29 jets to launch the powerful weapons, but compatibility with those Soviet-era aircraft with modern cruise missiles is imperfect, forcing the weapon to be programmed on the ground and making it impossible to chance targets once the aircraft lifts off, Holubtsov said.

“The munitions that our partners give us are technologically better-developed, more modern, more accurate and more protected from spoofing. But the Russians have a lot more (air weapons), and they have been preparing for this war for years and years,” he said.

The US web magazine Politico on June 5 reported Kyiv was “frustrated” at the pace of the now 12-month international ramp-up program for deployment of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.

Ukraine has 30 selected and qualified candidate pilots for crossover training to F-16s, as many as 60 of the combat aircraft will be delivered to Ukraine in summer, but only a fraction of the aviators that could learn to fly the plane will be able to any time soon, because there aren’t enough training spots in flight schools in the US, Denmark and Romania, the article said. The major US magazine Newsweek published much the same information on June 7.

Holubstov confirmed limited numbers of F-16-qualified pilots and training slots to teach them the aircraft is the chief bottleneck to Kyiv’s deployment of more than a few F-16s in coming months.

Knowledge of English is another brake on training up both pilots and ground crew for Ukraine’s F-16 program, he said, because all training and operational materials connected with the F-16 are overwhelmingly in English, which has forced Ukrainian Air Force planners to designate strong command of English a critical – rather than nice-to-have – skill for all personnel flying or maintaining the aircraft. Language training even for airmen with basic English has added between two to four months to all training cycles, Holubstov said.