Swedish Gripens to protect Ukraine aid hub in Poland

Sweden will send JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets back into NATO’s air defense mission over Poland from October, where they will help protect the hub in the country’s southeast that funnels military and civilian aid into Ukraine, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said on Sept. 30.

Most of the aircraft will fly from bases in Sweden, with only a smaller forward presence in Poland to support operations, Jonson wrote on X. Neither he nor the Swedish government said how many Gripens will take part or how long the deployment will last.

“Poland is a close ally and a vital hub for support to Ukraine. Swedish security is built together with our allies in NATO, and by taking responsibility together,” Jonson wrote.

The jets will join NATO’s integrated air and missile defense, the alliance’s network of fighters, radars and ground-based systems that watches for and intercepts aircraft, missiles and drones. Their main task is guarding the logistics hub in southeastern Poland, centered on the Rzeszów-Jasionka area near the Ukrainian border, through which much of the Western equipment bound for Ukraine passes.

“Repeated violations of NATO airspace underline the need for high readiness on the eastern flank,” Jonson wrote.

The most serious of those violations came in September 2025, when Polish and allied aircraft shot down Russian drones that crossed into Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine, the first time NATO jets had engaged Russian aircraft over alliance territory since the full-scale invasion began.

Swedish fighters have already guarded the same hub once before. After joining NATO in March 2024, Sweden sent six Gripens from its Norrbotten Wing to Malbork Air Base in northern Poland in March 2025 for NATO’s enhanced air policing mission, the first time Swedish combat aircraft operated from an ally’s territory. In May 2025, six more Gripen C fighters and about 120 personnel from the Blekinge Wing followed to protect the logistics hub that the new mission will cover.

The Gripen is a single-engine multirole fighter built by Saab, and its design emphasizes operating from dispersed bases and short runways with small ground crews, a feature suited to flying missions over Poland from home airfields in southern Sweden.

Swedish Gripens also flew NATO missions from Keflavik in Iceland in February and March 2026, and in August the Swedish broadcaster SVT reported that Stockholm planned to send Gripens and warships to help patrol Finland’s border with Russia, AeroTime reported.