I guess those fighters already entered service in UAF since few days ago and explained why Ukraine still could sorties in the Donbass as claimed by Russian MoD of shooting down Su-24,Su-27 and MiG-29...
Ukraine Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter Kich
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It's possible that some aircraft survived the initial attacks. Serbia had quite a few jets survive the Kosovo war.
If it's true and these have been transferred looks like the Russian bluff has been successfully called out by the west. In other words further erosion of Russia's nuclear deterent.
I think you guys are spinning gold out of straw. The US made public a few days ago it was going to send some Mi-17 helicopters they had stored which were supposed to go to Afghanistan into Ukraine. Those are the "aircraft". Ukraine had lots of Su-27, MiG-29, and Su-25 aircraft which they kept hidden after the initial Russian strikes. And they still send one or two out every once in a while and they promptly get shot down. Even if you sent to Ukraine all the MiG-29 in NATO, most of them Polish, it would make no difference. The early Fulcrums did not even have a proper radar and are highly vulnerable to long range attacks with missiles like the R-77-1. Without a ground defense radar network to cue them in they are basically flying blind there without a proper tactical picture.
Sure. Aircraft parts. I can see them getting, say, Su-25 aircraft parts since that used to be manufactured in Tbilisi. But good luck getting MiG-29 or Su-27 parts. At best they could cannibalize parts from the Polish (ex-East German) MiG-29s. And as far as I know all the engines were and are manufactured in Russian soil. So which "airplane" is this? More aircraft that should have gone to Afghanistan? MD500 helicopters and Super Tucano turboprops and other shit like that which the Ukrainians are not even trained to use? So far all NATO has provided is basically aid to their own MIC. A giant cash for clunkers MIC recycling scheme. NATO is sending their mothballed trash to Ukraine, getting newly minted money from the central government, and will likely use it to buy refurbished US and other NATO equipment for their own use later at massively inflated prices. Like Poland which is paying like $2.5 million per each refurbished M1 tank. That is the price of a brand new T-14 Armata and over the price of two T-72B3M tank upgrades.
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The Afghan helicopter story was an old one, I don't know why you're conflating it with this which is obviously a new development.
I also think you're underestimating human ingenuity. That plus a big enough budget you can make a non-functioning aircraft functional again. How many years have the Iranians kept their F-14s running despite a US parts embargo.
Sure. Let us say you manage by some miracle to take out all the Ukrainian aircraft out of storage and get them to fly. Plus whatever you can get from former Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union nations. They are still Soviet era late 1980s aircraft. That Su-27 still has a cassegrain radar and the MiG-29 has no radar. And the Russians are using the Su-35 with Irbis-E PESA armed with the R-77-1. At the same time all their radars and IADS is up. So what will you do about that? Even if you started sending F-16s by the hundreds the Russians would still manage to chew them up with the IADS and VVS. They would get the MiG-31BM from backline bases and start shooting aircraft down. You send them directly from NATO bases and those bases become targets. You send them in crates, and those crates need to be transported, and pieces need to be assembled. You use transport aircraft direct into Ukraine? They get shot down like the one the Russians shot down near Odessa. By ship? The Russian Black Sea fleet is blockading all the coast they have left. You use the train network? The Russians will blow it up. So you will be sending aircraft in parts in trucks into Ukraine. Good luck.
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Not very much.
But it was the Russians who were threatening WW3 a month ago if these jets were transferred to the Ukraine. If they weren't going to make much of a difference why threaten to attack whichever country was providing them?
If they takeoff from NATO airbases into Ukraine airspace then NATO becomes a cobelligerent.
It is as simple as that. And that is all the Russians said. If NATO does that then NATO becomes a target. Why do you think in WW2 whenever US B-29 bomber pilots had to make a forced landing in Siberia, back when the Soviets still had the peace treaty with Japan, those aircraft and even their crews were interred? If they just refueled them and let them back to US airbases then that would have been a casus belli for Japan to fight the Soviet Union.
It is as simple as that. And that is all the Russians said. If NATO does that then NATO becomes a target. Why do you think in WW2 whenever US B-29 bomber pilots had to make a forced landing in Siberia, back when the Soviets still had the peace treaty with Japan, those aircraft and even their crews were interred? If they just refueled them and let them back to US airbases then that would have been a casus belli for Japan to fight the Soviet Union.
That wasn't my recollection. By that logic, Russia would be fine with America transferring F-35s over so long as they didn't take off from a NATO base?
Also, how do you know they haven't mated the jets with western missiles, or integrated the jets with NATO AWACS? A month is a long time.