Ukraine Is Getting Gripen Jets From Sweden. They're Designed To Fight The Ukrainian Way.

The nimble, rugged Gripen is optimized for dispersed operations.

Peter Felstead photo

The Ukrainian air force may eventually re-equip with Saab Gripen E/F fighters.

The nimble supersonic jets are uniquely suited to the Ukrainian way of war, which requires the air force to spread far and wide across small airfields and even roadway airstrips in order to avoid attack.

This matters because Ukraine’s jets keep flying by avoiding big, vulnerable air bases—dispersing instead to highways and hidden strips across the country. But this survival strategy puts intense pressure on the aircraft. While Ukrainian brigades can coax American F-16s into this nomadic existence, it requires mobile support teams and kid-glove treatment.

The Gripen doesn’t—it’s built for rough-field warfare. Sweden designed the jet in the 1980s specifically to survive Soviet strikes on air bases, operating instead from highway strips scattered across the country.

Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky met with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson in Helsinki on Wednesday in order to discuss the deal. “We expect that the future contract will enable us to obtain at least 100 of these jets,” Zelensky said.

“We are looking into how this can be financed,” Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson said of the potentially multi-billion-dollar acquisition.

It could take years for the first Gripens to arrive in Ukraine. If and when they do, they should fit right in.

The Swedish fighter is specifically designed to fly from short, rough airstrips—just like the Ukrainian air force’s current, mostly ex-Soviet, fighters do—all in order to avoid detection by Russian drones and bombardment by Russian missiles.

This difficult but critical dispersal practice is the main reason why the Ukrainian air force is still in the fight 44 months into Russia’s wider war. Many of the jets the Ukrainians have lost have been hit at the air force’s main air bases, which are big, vulnerable and well-known to Russian strike planners.

The Ukrainian jets that have survived are the ones that have avoided the big bases—and flown from small civilian airfields and long stretches of highway, instead.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.