from Sputnik News:
Kiev is hoping to receive several dozen F-16 fighter jets from its NATO ‘partners’ following Washington’s approval of the training of Ukrainian pilots to fly the planes. Moscow has vowed to account for the deployment of F-16s into its military strategy, and warned that such an “escalation scenario” carries “enormous risks” for the West.
The F-16 – America’s workhorse fourth-generation multi-role fighter, would suffer a serious blow to its reputation if the planes are sent to Ukraine and destroyed at their airfields or downed in air-to-air combat by Russian jets.
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That’s according to a fresh analysis of an independent military news portal, which cites Washington’s previously-expressed reluctance to allow allies like the Netherlands and Norway to supply older F-16s to Ukraine as a sign that the US officials recognize that “the United States would be bearing the primary risk” from their deployment.
“Not only is there a possibility that the fighter or its technologies could fall into Russian hands, as other Western equipment has in considerable quantities, but there is also a much greater chance that the fighters could suffer significant losses both to strikes on their airfields and in air-to-air combat which would be a major blow to the F-16’s reputation,” the portal noted.
Pointing to the F-16’s increasingly outdated status against peer competitors, the outlet stressed that in fighting against Russian air power, there would be a “very high possibility that the class [of fighters] would have only very limited survivability due to its lack of stealth capabilities and limited ability to engage top end heavyweight aircraft in the Russian fleet,” including the Su-35, the MiG-31 and the Su-57. Deployment to Ukraine would also mean vulnerability to Russian long-range surface-to-air missiles.
