“If you’re a retired F-16 pilot and you’re looking to fight for freedom, they will hire you here,” Graham said at a press conference in Kyiv on Monday. “They’re going to look throughout NATO nations for willing fighter pilots who retired to come to help them until they can get their pilots trained.”
“We’re going to get these jets into the theater sooner rather than later,” the Republican lawmaker added, according to RT.
A host of Western nations, including Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway, have pledged to provide Ukraine with more than 80 F-16 fighters. In service since 1978, the F-16 is currently flown by more than two dozen countries, although many are retiring these aging airframes in favor of the more modern F-35.
Zelensky admitted that Ukraine does not have enough pilots to fly all of the jets pledged by the West, but said that “many guys are now training.” These pilots are currently being trained in the US and Denmark, while it is unclear whether a new training hub in Romania has begun accepting cadets.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that any base hosting Ukrainian F-16s would become a legitimate target for the Russian military, while the Kremlin has declared that no amount of Western hardware will win the conflict for Ukraine.
“These planes will appear, their number will gradually decrease, and they will be shot down and destroyed. They will not be able to significantly influence the dynamics of events at the front,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier this month.
SD/