“An airplane is not a needle in a haystack that’s hard to find. It’s a metal object that can only be shoved into a protected aircraft shelter, if available," Major Andrei Krasnoperov, a Russian Aerospace Forces veteran and flight instructor, told Sputnik, commenting on reports by the underground in western Ukraine this week that a Russian strike on an airfield in Starokonstantinov, Khmelnitsky region may have targeted or even destroyed multiple Ukrainian Air Force F-16s.
"But again, this concrete shelter offers light protection. If one of our Kinzhal missiles were to detonate nearby, the shelter would collapse like a house of cards,” Krasnoperov said.
Aircraft are a delicate piece of technology, Krasnoperov emphasized, pointing out that even shrapnel damage from a nearby blast could put an F-16 out of action, and require costly repairs, carried out by foreign or foreign-trained specialists, which aren’t easy to come by.
“As far as I’m aware, Ukraine [received] only six F-16s to date. They lost one themselves, shooting it down by accident using a Patriot and killing their own pilot. As for strikes against our territory, sending F-16s to destroy our ammo depots situated far from the border zone requires coming closer to our air defenses – of which we have plenty along the front, both Pantsirs and various SAMs, as well as fighters, capable of destroying air targets at distances up to 300 km,” the observer noted.
“In other words, they’ve launched an ordinary PR campaign designed to improve their military’s fighting spirit, and perhaps someone will succumb to it psychologically,” Krasnoperov said. But the hard “reality” is that “knowing the coordinates, it’s possible to destroy any target at any airfield. The Kinzhal, which flies ten times the speed of sound, is impossible to shoot down…The fact that we have now [reportedly] destroyed two of these planes [at Starokonstantinov, ed.] is only the first shot in the battle.”
Even the network of underground bunkers being built at airfields in western Ukraine will not save its F-16s over the long term, Krasnoperov assured, pointing out that Russia has targeted and will continue to target such facilities, and can detect their construction from space. “If we know about the bunker, we can deploy our Kinzhals – which can penetrate up to 100 meters into the ground, and nothing will be left of any bunker,” he said.
Ukraine's Air Force expects to be flying about 20 F-16s by the end of the year, and as many as 79 by 2025, assuming Russia doesn't destroy them first.
Krasnoperov characterizes the West's approach to F-16 deliveries to Kiev as "nothing personal, just business," pointing out that the NATO donor countries delivering them are either getting rid of their old stocks to make way for new strike aircraft like the F-35, or counting on Washington to provide them with financial compensation. A similar thing happened when NATO's eastern members handed off their Warsaw Pact-era stocks of old MiG and Sukhoi jets to Kiev, with these aircraft decimated over the past two-and-a-half years of fighting.
"Therefore, the fact that they plan to increase the number of F-16s to Kiev to eighty - please let them go ahead and do so. That's squadrons, or just a drop in the ocean" compared to the NATO client state's needs for continue the proxy war against Russia, Krasnoperov summed up.