Aug 08, 2024

Ukrainian F-16 fighter jets have been spotted along the frontline in the country’s southern Kherson region, according to a Russia-installed official.

The fourth-generation jets, provided by the West in recent weeks, were seen over the Ukrainian settlement of Kakhovka in the past two days, Pavlo Filipchuk, the Russian-backed head of the southern district, said on Thursday.

Kakhovka sits on the largely Russian-controlled east bank of the Dnipro River, which has broadly marked the frontline for much of the full-scale war.

On Sunday, Ukraine officially confirmed that the Lockheed Martin-made aircraft had arrived in the country and were already operational with Kyiv’s air force.

“I am proud of all our guys who have mastered these aircraft and have already started using them for our country,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

“F-16s are already in Ukrainian skies, and there will be more,” Zelensky said in a separate statement on Thursday.

“Since yesterday, F-16 [fighters] have been flying over our district,” Filipchuk said in remarks published by Tass, the Russian state news agency. “This is being done only to sow panic.”

Newsweek could not independently verify these reports and has reached out to the Ukrainian air force for comment.

F-16s are the most significant aid commitment from Kyiv’s Western backers, greenlit by the U.S. in August 2023.

The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium pledged a total of approximately 80 jets to Ukraine, but the timetables for getting the aircraft to the war-torn country were plagued by delays and uncertainty.

Though not a game-changer in themselves at a time when Russia has advanced in eastern Ukraine, the jets will be a significant upgrade to Ukraine’s Soviet-era air force, battered by nearly two-and-a-half years of full-scale war with Russia’s superior and more numerous fleet.

They will also be an attractive propaganda and military target for Russian forces. The Kremlin has indicated Russian soldiers have been offered rewards for taking out Ukraine’s F-16s.

The Kherson region is one of the four regions of mainland Ukraine that Russia has said it has annexed, along with Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. Moscow also controls Crimea, to the south of mainland Ukraine, which it annexed in 2014.

During its 2022 counteroffensive, Ukraine pushed Russian forces back to the east bank of the Dnipro and established pockets of control in settlements like Krynky, southwest of Kakhovka.

But despite fighting rumbling in on Kherson, clashes in southeast Ukraine attract far less attention than the steady pace of Russian advances in the eastern Donetsk region since February 2022, or Moscow’s cross-border push into the northeastern Kharkiv region since May 2024.

Earlier this week, Kyiv launched operations in Russia’s Kursk region, which borders Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, denounced by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “large-scale provocation” during a meeting with senior Russian officials on Wednesday.

Russia said it had managed to stop the advance of Ukrainian troops into Kursk. “The enemy has not advanced a single meter; on the contrary, it is retreating,” Kursk’s acting deputy governor, Andrei Belostotsky, said on Thursday.

However, Russia’s influential military blogger community suggested the situation along the border was “difficult.”

https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-war-f-16-fighter-jets-seen-russian-controlled-kherson-1936436