“And millions of drones”
Yes, literally millions of drones.
In January of this year, a coalition of nations was formed under the joint leadership of the UK and Latvia, just to provide combat drones to Ukraine, including Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Sweden, Estonia, and Denmark.
Denmark and the Netherlands alone announced a joint procurement of drones worth 400 million euros. When the UK Prime Minister addressed the Ukrainian Rada during the signing of the UK’s ten year support agreement with Ukraine, he specifically mentioned their goal to support the Ukrainian domestic production of a million drones in 2024, as well as the additional external provision of drones (which is currently targeted at two million more this year).
The world has never seen such a fleet of combat drones.
Of course, the UK’s GDP is much larger than Russia’s (and drone coalition member Germany’s is much larger still), but talks are underway to expand the drone coalition to two dozen countries this year, which is expected to increase the number of drones further.
Russia’s atrocious war crimes (literally tens of thousands being formally investigated) have so shocked the conscience of the world, that many multi-national coalitions have been established to provide military capabilities to Ukraine, like the French led Artillery coalition, the Norwegian led Naval coalition, and of course, the fighter jet coalition that is providing F-16s.
The thousands of F-16s that have been produced are being replaced by F-35s. With over a thousand F-35s already delivered, many more F-16s are available, than the few hundred remaining Soviet era fighter jets in Russia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s production of new fighter jets dropped to a small fraction of Soviet production, and they were overwhelmingly exported. Since sanctions were imposed in 2022, Russian fighter jet production has collapsed. Russia fields about 400 in total, but not all are operational, and they are wearing them out with a high rate of operational hours during this war..
nutter