Ukraine's F‑16s face off against renewed Russian missile threats

Russians, in recent days, have conducted massive airstrikes on Ukraine using their entire available arsenal. One of the most important means of attack, aside from ballistic missiles, were cruise missiles, which the newly delivered F-16 aircraft were also supposed to hunt. Here’s how they did it.

The Russians launched hundreds of objects at Kyiv and elsewhere, consisting of ballistic missiles Iskander-M, cruise missiles Ch-101 launched from Tu-95MS strategic bombers and 3M14 Kalibr missiles fired from surface or underwater units, as well as numerous Shahed drones.

The latter served as a diversion to complicate Ukrainian air defences in dealing with more challenging targets and was also used for mapping Ukrainian activities.

The real threat was the aforementioned cruise missiles, which, aside from having a more precise guidance system with a declared accuracy of about 6 metres (in wartime production, it will be worse), have a much stronger warhead. For example, the standard Ch-101 has an approximately 400-kilogram high-explosive or penetrating warhead, but recently, an improved model with an additional cluster warhead has appeared.

Missiles from the Ch-101 family are adapted to fly at low altitudes, often relying on terrain depressions such as canyons or riverbeds. Combined with a design incorporating stealth features, this significantly hinders their detection by ground-based air defences. Physically, Ukrainians would have to practically deploy radars every 40 kilometres across the entire border due to the so-called radar horizon.

This is unfeasible, so the best solution is to use aircraft that can oversee a vast area. The Ukrainian Air Force currently has a handful of MiG-29s and Su-27s, which are a worse choice as cruise missile hunters than the received F-16s.

The F-16s have significantly better radar for detecting more challenging targets, even flying at low altitudes, and also have targeting pods adapted for detecting and tracking such objects. Subsequently, cruise missiles or drones are destroyed with AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles or even with the onboard six-barrel M61A 20-millimetre calibre gun.