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.
The reason Rutte is pushing this through ASAP is because Wilders ‘won’ the last election, and might become the next PM. He’s widely seen as pro-Putin.
Scuse my ignorance, but why put ‘won’ in quotes? Did he not actually win?
He’s the head of the biggest party. He didn’t personally win since NL doesn’t vote for heads of state on a personal basis.
What SMillerNL said. Also: he didn’t gain an absolute majority, and as the Netherlands doesn’t use a first past the post system like the US or UK, he’ll need to form a coalition government to be able to rule the country.
Sounds like a bad idea to announce when the hardware will be moving. We’ve seen past weapons transfers announced to be happening “soon” though they’ve already occurred. They may well already be in Ukraine.
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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
Does anyone know what kind of timeline there might be before the pilots are trained to fly them? Is it something that might have an impact within days/weeks or is it going to be months before they can be used effectively?
I’m pretty sure ukrainian pilots have already been trained. So they should be ready to use as soon as they’re delivered.
They’ve been training since at least August from what I’ve read. https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/20/world/ukrainian-fighters-training-f-16-intl-hnk/index.html
now zelensky can hit putin at home
According to MBFC, RFERL frequently publishes pro-US government propaganda. Why is this source allowed?
Do you have any actual issues with the article or do you just want to sow doubt and discord?
Is Reuters fine as a source? How about the Dutch PM himself?
