Underneath a earlier authorities, Slovakia donated its fleet of near-obsolete Russian fighters to the Ukrainian battle effort.
Slovakia has obtained the primary two of a promised 14 F-16 navy jets from the US after a two-year delay attributable to the coronavirus pandemic and an absence of chips.
President Peter Pellegrini celebrated the arrival of the jets, saying that they might “contribute to the rise of defence capabilities of our nation”.
Slovakia invested 2% of its GDP in defence in 2024, however has largely relied on its neighbours to patrol its skies because it grounded a few dozen Soviet-era MiG-29 jets in 2022.
The MiG-29s lacked spare components and technicians that would keep them after Russian technicians left Slovakia for Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Fellow NATO members Poland, the Czech Republic, and later Hungary stepped in to protect Slovakian airspace.
In 2022, Prime Minister Eduard Heger’s authorities gifted Ukraine its fleet of MiG-29s after the Ukrainian authorities stated they had been mandatory for its defence towards Russia’s full-scale invasion.
It turned the second NATO nation, after Poland, to fulfil Kyiv’s requests for the disused warplanes.
The $1.8 billion (€1.6 billion) deal to buy the alternative F-16s from the US was struck in 2018. It contains each the plane themselves and the coaching of pilots and logistics companies. The remainder of the 14 jets will probably be delivered over a interval of two years.
The defence minister on the time, Peter Gajdos, stated the deal was “the absolute best resolution”. Nevertheless, Slovakia now has a comparatively pro-Russian authorities led by Prime Minister Robert Fico. Throughout the parliamentary election that introduced him to energy, he explicitly condemned the donations of the jets to Ukraine.
