Armed with glide bombs and “NATO Wi-Fi,” F-16s strike Russians around Sumy while elite brigades abandon the north.
David Axe
June 2, 2025
Euromaidan Press
Ukraine is running out of choices. Russia has 50,000 troops threatening to besiege Sumy, a city with a pre-war population of 250,000 just 30 kilometers from the border. Ukraine’s response: gamble its rarest aircraft on missions they might not survive.
The Ukrainian air force is sortieing its small fleet of ex-European F-16s to drop American-made glide bombs on Russian regiments rolling into Sumy Oblast.
Two months after an elite Russian drone group cut the supply lines feeding the Ukrainian force clinging to a 600-square-km salient around the town of Sudzha in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast—ultimately driving the Ukrainians from Kursk after a bitter, six-month battle—the Russians are pressing their advantage on the northern front of their 39-month wider war on Ukraine.
In all, there are no fewer than 50,000 Russian troops in Kursk. The Ukrainian brigades holding the line in Sumy, just across the border from Kursk, have many fewer troops—especially now that at least one formation, the elite 82nd Air Assault Brigade, has rushed south to Donetsk Oblast to block a Russian attack on the town of Kostiantynivka, a critical strongpoint in Ukrainian defenses in the east.
The arrival of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade and other reinforcements in the east has helped to slow the Russian advance along the stretch of front line between Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar and could save Kramatorsk and other key cities comprising the so-called “fortress belt” threading through Donetsk toward the border in the north.
But it’s already come at the cost of some border villages in Sumy. And if the Ukrainians aren’t careful, they could lose the villages of Yunakivka and Vodolahy. Worse, the city of Sumy itself, 30 km from the border, could come under siege. “On the Sumy direction, the enemy offensive is intensifying,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies warned. “The Kursk group of forces is concentrating reserves in the border zone, attempting to break through between Yunakivka and Vodolahy.”
Ukrainian ground forces are stretched thin defending against separate Russian offensives in the north and east, so Ukrainian air power is filling the gaps.
The Ukrainian air force has received just a few dozen of the 85 American-built F-16 fighters that a Danish-Dutch-Norwegian consortium has pledged from European surplus stocks. Three of the single-engine, supersonic fighters have been lost since they first flew into action in August.
The F-16s are precious assets, but the dire situation in Sumy warrants risking them. The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team noted F-16s lobbing US-supplied Small Diameter Bombs—114-kg precision glide bombs—at Russian forces in and around Kursk. “The application of F-16s in this role came as somewhat of a surprise,” CIT observed, “as they were initially utilized as ‘flying air defense’ deep within Ukrainian territory and only began appearing near the front line in the Sumy region in late winter 2025, accompanying Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter aircraft that launched guided aerial bombs.” “It is possible that the [Ukrainian air force] has begun using their F-16s closer to the front line due to the recent arrival of new aircraft or due to an acute need to increase firepower,” CIT proposed.
The F-16s are being upgraded for more dangerous missions. Kateryna Chernohorenko, the Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine for Digital Development, Digital Transformation and Digitalization, announced that the F-16s—as well as Ukraine’s French-supplied Mirage 2000 jets—will get software allowing them to plug into the Link-16 radio network.
Link-16, which Chernohorenko described as “NATO’s military Wi-Fi,” connects command posts, radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, and warplanes in a single network. It can share data so that each HQ, missile battery, and plane sees what the others see.
The Link-16 upgrade may not save all the Ukrainian F-16s as they fly into the danger zone to bomb the Russian troops threatening Sumy. But the Ukrainian command is running out of options as it struggles to hold back Russia’s dual offensives.