Moscow will consider the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine by Western countries as a nuclear threat, and Russian forces will shoot them down if they appear in Ukrainian airspace, a senior Russian diplomat has said.
“The supply of these aircraft to Ukraine, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has already said, would be a crossing of the ‘red line’ and would turn into a nuclear issue,” Konstantin Gavrilov, head of the Russian delegation to the Vienna talks on security and arms control, said on the Izvestia TV channel.
“We don’t know what it will carry – a conventional bomb weighing a ton or a ton and a half, or a tactical nuclear warhead. The Russian armed forces will shoot them down,” Gavrilov said.
He stressed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken quite clearly about this during his visit to Uzbekistan.
“The president warned unfriendly Western countries, which seem to have lost their minds, that their countries are densely populated and they should think about the consequences of using long-range destruction weapons on Russian territory. Everything has its limits,” Gavrilov explained.
Earlier, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said that the Netherlands intends to transfer 24 F-16 fighters to Ukraine, which could be used to strike targets in Russia. She said that the Netherlands applies the same principle to everything it supplies to Kyiv: once the weapons are in Ukrainian hands, they are free to use them as they see fit.
The Netherlands, together with Denmark, created a “fighter jet coalition” for Ukraine in July 2023. This group of countries has pledged to provide Kyiv with F-16s and to help train Ukrainian pilots and technicians to operate the US-made fourth-generation jets.
The first batch of Danish F-16s is expected to be delivered to Ukraine this summer.
At the end of May, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen also said that Ukraine would be allowed to use Danish-supplied F-16 fighters to strike military targets inside Russian territory.
