Konstantin Gavrilov, Russia’s chief delegate to the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, warned yesterday that Russia views the F-16’s that a number of NATO members are supplying to Ukraine as a very serious threat and will take every measure to destroy them once they are delivered to Ukraine. He recalled that unfriendly countries had already been warned about the seriousness of this issue.
“Nevertheless, they insist—the Netherlands, for instance, and the Danish super-heroes—that they will allow F-16’s to be used wherever they can on Russian territory,” Gavrilov said in comments to the Izvestia TV channel, reported TASS. “It’s not just a fighter jet. It’s a delivery vehicle of nuclear weapons. Their attempts to use [this fighter jet], as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, on the territory of Ukraine and so on—will be a question of nuclear safety: we don’t know what it carries, a one-ton or one-and-a-half-ton conventional bomb or a tactical nuclear warhead. Well, [the Russian Armed Forces forces] will be shooting them down.”
