Russia-Ukraine War (continuing)

No mental gymnastics here. War began in 22 zero contact since then. Russia announce they want talks send their negotiators. So that means they don’t want peace or to talk. Okay.

To be fair, that’s the total number of aircraft promised, not the number of airframes delivered and operational. Those numbers are, unsurprisingly, not publicly available for OPSEC reasons, but I’ve tried to piece together a coherent picture.

According to this article from just a few days ago, Denmark had delivered 12 of the 19 F-16 it had pledged:

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/norway-to-hand-over-all-operational-f-16s-to-ukraine-this-year/

Numbers are pretty much impossible to get for any of the other nations, but this piece by Reuters from December 2023 states that the Netherlands were getting ready to deliver an initial batch of 18 aircraft.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/netherlands-deliver-18-f-16-fighter-jets-ukraine-2023-12-22/

Given the age of the article, my assumption is that this batch has been delivered in its entirety

Another article from February 2025 states that another batch of F-16s had been delivered from the Netherlands, without stating any numbers:

https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/02/06/netherlands-sends-another-batch-of-f-16-fighters-to-ukraine/

It is not specified how many airframes were delivered, so it could be anything. But given that the article states that the Netherlands pledged 24 aircraft, my suspicion is that this batch would be made up of the 6 F-16s needed to bring the number from 18 to the pledge of 24.

This would leave the total number of delivered F-16s at 36, which would make sense since this is the size of an aviation brigade in the Ukrainian Air Force. It would make sense to group all of the aircraft together in one brigade to make logistics easier. If we take @RoyalCelt’s number of 3 losses as factual, that would leave Ukraine with 33 operational F-16s, plus that first batch of 6 Mirage 2000 delivered from France. Keep in mind that these are back-of-the-envelope calculations based on very little available information with quite a bit of guesswork thrown in. Also, these numbers don’t take into consideration how many of these aircraft were transferred to Ukraine but are based at the F-16 Training Center at Feteşti Air Base in Romania.

It is worth noting that so far, only Denmark and the Netherlands have actually delivered F-16s. From what I can see, no aircraft have been received from Norway or Belgium yet, and I’m not sure if the transfer of Greek F-16s is still going ahead. I’m also not clear about the total number of aircraft pledged by the Netherlands. The original press reports stated that 24 aircraft had been promised, but I’ve since read that their entire fleet of 42 aircraft might be going to Ukraine. Either way, there’s going to be a sustained stream of F-16s coming into Ukraine for some time to come, and we’re likely going to see at least one if not two more aviation brigades equipped with these aircraft.

It’s interesting that Norway actually pulled their F-16s out of mothballs to assist with training. It looks like it’ll only be around six aircraft in total, but every airframe helps as far as I’m concerned.

As for the Czech contribution, my understanding is that the article is much more of an op/ed “think piece” than an actual commitment for aircraft. Czech aircraft manufacturer Aero Vodochody (Named after the location and factory in the town of Vodochody, north of Prague) used to be one of the primary suppliers of jet trainers to Warsaw Pact members, producing over 6000 L-29 “Delfin” and L-39 “Albatros” trainers. Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Aero has ceaselessly updated the L-39 design, with the L-159 ALCA (Advanced Light Combar Aircraft) being the latest evolution.They’ve had a few sales successes, but nothing coming close to their glory days, despite massive attempts by pretty much every Czech government since the mid 1990s to push sales to every country whose representatives couldn’t run fast enough. To me, that article is more about pushing the current government to advocate for the purchase of new L-59s or L-159s by Ukraine than anything else.