The skies above Ukraine now roar with the sound of F-16s targeting jet-powered drones.
Under siege and short on interceptor missiles, Ukraine is using the American-made fighter planes as a first line of defense against Russia’s deadly new weapon of choice.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently described the F-16 as “one of the most effective tools for shooting down” the drones, which have been menacing Ukraine’s cities. But being on constant patrol for drones that cost Russia no more than $70,000 to build is taking a toll on the multimillion-dollar fighter planes.
Ukraine’s small fleet of F-16s — about 50 in all — are in the air so often that they risk breaking down, officials and experts say. About half of Ukraine’s F-16 fleet is grounded, undergoing maintenance elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Zelensky said this month.
Kyiv is still waiting for additional F-16s that Belgium promised to donate more than three years ago. Only a few dozen Ukrainian pilots at a time can be trained to fly the jets. And running out of ammunition is a top concern.
David A. Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general who is now head of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a research group near Washington, said Ukraine was “forced to use a relatively small fighter fleet day after day as a substitute for an adequately resourced, layered air defense system.” He also noted that using the F-16s in that way meant Ukrainian forces were “consuming a finite resource faster than they should.”
“It’s not a sustainable long-term proposition,” he added.
Ukraine is rushing to develop other interceptors, but for now, the F-16s are among the few weapons Kyiv has that can keep up with the jet-powered drones and shoot them down without burning through costly Patriot missiles. The fighter jets have taken down as many as 90 percent of incoming cruise missiles in some attacks, said Col. Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force.
The reliance on F-16s has made them “critical for Ukraine,” said Lt. Gen. Krzysztof Krol, assistant to the chief of staff of Poland’s armed forces. But the fleet, he said, is “definitely insufficient.”
Fighting for Fighter Jets
For Ukraine, getting F-16s was itself a battle.
The sophisticated fighter jets, made by the American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin, require U.S. government approval to be sold or transferred abroad.
Mr. Zelensky began asking for them soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Some allies were willing to donate old F-16s. But the Biden administration resisted for more than a year, worried about escalating tensions between NATO and Russia and whether Ukraine could properly maintain the jets.
When Washington relented, in May 2023, it took months to begin training Ukrainian pilots to fly the jets. The first F-16s — donated by Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway — did not arrive in Ukraine until over a year later.
Since then, the planes have been airborne almost constantly, and five of them have been damaged or destroyed in battle, according to the weapons tracking site Oryx. One was shot down, killing its battle-tested pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, after being scrambled against a Russian air assault just weeks after the F-16s arrived in Ukraine.
The fighter planes have also racked up successes. F-16s shot down “a significant portion” of the 1,900 jet drones that Ukraine intercepted last month, out of the 3,500 that Russia launched, Colonel Ihnat said in an interview. He also said that one F-16 pilot recently shot down 10 jet-powered drones during a single flight.
The fighter jets had also intercepted 666 cruise missiles and about 2,500 drones of different types as of late September, according to Lt. Gen. Anatolii Kryvonozhko, commander of the Ukrainian Air Force. And in July, an F-16 shot down a Russian Su-35 fighter jet, Colonel Ihnat said, a win for Ukraine’s overmatched force.
“Skeptics said that we would not be able to operate them from our airfields, that we would not be able to preserve them, that we would not be able to fight with them,” Colonel Ihnat said. “Where are those skeptics now?”
Though the F-16s have flown attack missions over Ukraine, firing more than 650 airstrikes against Russian ground targets, they have largely been used for air defense.
While protection from the constant pummeling of cruise missiles and drones is a priority, General Deptula, the retired U.S. general, noted, “Every F-16 sortie chasing a drone is an F-16 sortie not available for offensive counter-air missions.”
The F-16s are not equipped to launch the long-range missiles needed to put Moscow on defense — either by striking Russian military sites behind the front lines or by forcing Russian pilots to pull back.
So far, those missions have been carried out by French-made Mirages and Soviet-era warplanes that make up the rest of Ukraine’s fighter jet fleet.
Changing Warfare
Building up the fleet will take time.
Ukraine is buying 20 new Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, which is also donating 16 older models of the plane, which will arrive “soon,” Mr. Zelensky said last week. France has agreed to sell Rafale jets, though they won’t be delivered for at least two more years. Both warplanes are able to fire so-called deep strike missiles that can hit targets hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory.
Additionally, Ukraine is negotiating with Lockheed Martin to buy the newest F-16 model, which could carry longer-range missiles with U.S. government approval.
The Fetesti Air Base in southeastern Romania is the only training site outside the United States where Ukrainian pilots fly the F-16. The program at Fetesti is run by Lockheed, and training takes about six months following what is often more than a year of English language lessons and learning to fly less powerful Western jets.
Officials would not discuss how many Ukrainian pilots had completed F-16 training at air bases in the United States. But 19 pilots have graduated from the Lockheed program at Fetesti since September 2024, said Bill Thomas, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who runs the program.
Colonel Thomas, who flew the F-16 in combat over Kosovo in 1999, said the program focused more on counter-drone missions than what NATO pilots were taught five years ago, before Russia’s war in Ukraine began.
“It’s completely different because of the nature of this changing warfare,” he said in a recent interview at the Romanian base as a Ukrainian pilot fired up his jet for a morning flight.
One of the trainees, a 25-year old Ukrainian Air Force lieutenant from the Kyiv region who spoke on condition that he be identified only by his first initial, S, was preparing to fly the F-16 solo for the first time.
He arrived in Romania in February and was still too new to have earned a call sign or nickname. Compared with slower jets he had trained on at a base in Canada, piloting the F-16 “was, like, mind-blowing,” he said.
The nature of the fighting has “completely changed almost 10 times,” during his training, he said, so Ukrainians must “be ready.”
He added: “We don’t have any choice.”
Marc Santora and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
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