Ukraine sends mixed signals on F-16 repair delays

About half of Ukraine’s F-16 fighter jets have spent long stretches in Europe for repairs and maintenance, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, and some have taken so long to come back that Ukraine lost time when it needed them most to defend its skies.

Zelensky made the comments in an interview with the Financial Times published on Oct. 2. He said Kyiv wants Western partners to help move more of the maintenance work inside Ukraine, arguing that keeping the jets closer to the front would get them back into service faster. He did not say how many aircraft are affected, where in Europe the work is done, or how long the jets have been away.

Zelensky said the F-16s have been effective against Russia’s newer jet-powered drones, which fly faster than the propeller-driven Shahed-type drones Russia has used for most of the war. In the same interview, he said Ukrainian forces are shooting down about 57% of jet-powered drones and between 85% and 90% of conventional ones.

Hours later, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry pushed back on reports describing a readiness crisis in the F-16 fleet. Spokesperson Heorhiy Tykhyi said on X that claims of catastrophically low aircraft availability and excessively long maintenance turnaround times were false. He said Ukraine’s industrial partners are returning overhauled aircraft at an increasing pace and that maintenance times are getting shorter, not longer.

Tykhyi acknowledged that the fleet is hard to keep flying. Ukraine flies the jets intensively under demanding conditions, he said, and some components for its early-model F-16s are no longer produced and are getting harder to find. He warned that such reports should not undermine international funding for F-16 maintenance or cast doubt on the need for more jets from partner nations.

Ukraine’s F-16s are older jets from European air forces, mainly the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. The first ones arrived in the summer of 2024. They have been used to intercept Russian cruise missiles and drones and to strike ground targets, and Ukraine has lost several of them in combat and accidents.

Because the jets are Western-built, much of their deeper maintenance has been done outside Ukraine, where parts, tools and trained technicians are available and the aircraft are out of reach of Russian strikes on airfields. Moving that work into Ukraine would bring the jets closer to the fight but would also put repair sites within range of Russian missiles and drones.