On the menu today: Yes, I’m once again upset about slow-moving jets, but today it’s not about the ones in New York. At any given time, about half of the Ukrainian Air Force’s F-16 fighter jets are sitting in maintenance depots in Belgium instead of flying in the skies over Ukraine and shooting down Russian Shahed drones before they can kill Ukrainian civilians. While maintenance of warfighting jets is indisputably necessary and not a simple task, the Belgian repairs are proceeding at a snail’s pace, and that’s not the only less-than-helpful aspect of the Belgian government’s policies regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Elsewhere, in a televised interview, Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar demonstrates that her party really does believe in bringing families closer together. Read on.
Deadly Deleys
The Ukrainian Air Force has “about 50” F-16 fighter jets. At the end of September, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, Lieutenant General Anatoliy Kryvonozhko, said that Ukrainian pilots had managed to neutralize approximately 2,500 enemy drones of various types, plus 666 cruise missiles. (Boy, that number seems appropriate for such a downright demonic act, doesn’t it?)
On October 5, President Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an address to the nation, “As of today, this is one of the most effective tools for shooting down jet-powered shaheds.”
The older-model propeller Shahed drones have a top speed of about 115 miles per hour. The new jet-powered Shahed drones have a top speed of about 373 miles per hour. The F-16 has a top speed of Mach 2, but its high speed means it actually matches up closer to the faster jet-powered Shahed drones and has an easier time pursuing those than the older, slower ones.
Unfortunately, of those 50 or so F-16 fighter jets, Zelensky told the Financial Times October 2 that “about half were spending lengthy periods in Europe for repairs and maintenance.”
As the Wall Street Journal laid out at the end of September, those repairs and maintenance, conducted in Belgium, are taking way longer than they should:
But after 300 hours of flying time, F-16s require what’s known as “phase inspection” to keep the engine, avionics, hydraulics, fuel lines and other systems in working order.
The U.S. awarded Sabena Aerospace Engineering, a Belgian company, a contract of up to some $235.5 million for maintenance of Ukraine’s F-16s, though subcontractors perform some of the work. Phase inspection generally takes two to six weeks in the U.S., but it’s “taking as long as 40 weeks in Belgium,” says retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery.
Back in 2018, the Vermont Air National Guard described its phase inspection process:
The inspection typically lasts 18 work days, includes 117 separate work cards and 340 individual inspection steps. The general flow of the inspection involves nearly every shop, from Weapons, who deconfigure the aircraft, to crew chiefs, who prepare and wash the deconfigured jet, to the phase crew chiefs who depanel the jet and begin their works cards, to all the individual shops who have their own work cards or discrepancies to fix. These often include Avionics, Electrical and Environmental Systems (E&E), Engines, Fuels, Egress, Hydraulics, Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI), Machine and Structural.
Something that takes the U.S. Air National Guard 18 workdays to complete should not take the Belgians the better part of a year.
Wait, it gets worse. Back in August 2023, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre announced during a press conference with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that his country was transferring six F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. Norway was in the process of upgrading its fleet to the F-35; this summer, Norway completed its transition and now has a full fleet of 52 F-35s.
As of April 2026, nearly three years later, none of those jets had been delivered to Ukraine. According to Norwegian public broadcast NRK, “Two planes were used to train Ukrainian pilots in Denmark, but have been undergoing repairs in Belgium for over a year” and “four more aircraft could not fly on their own, so in April 2025 they were sent to the company in disassembled form to Belgium.” NRK said that reassembling the F-16s would take at least a year, “The four planes that were delivered disassembled are missing about 100 parts each.”
You would think they ordered the planes from Temu.
The Belgians have an unexpected defender in the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Georgiy Tikhiy, spokesman for the MFA, wrote October 2:
We have always recognized that sustaining these aircraft would be challenging, particularly because certain components for this early F-16 variant are no longer in production and are becoming increasingly difficult to source. However, recent reports alleging catastrophically low aircraft availability rates and excessively long maintenance turnaround times are simply false. Contrary to these claims, our industrial sustainment partners are not only continuing to deliver overhauled aircraft, but are doing so at an increasing pace. Turnaround times are decreasing, not increasing.
I spoke to retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, who’s with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and regularly travels to Ukraine to meet and advise that country’s military officials. Montgomery puts part of the responsibility for the slow pace of F-16 repairs at the feet of NATO.
“NATO underestimated the likely throughput of planes — a result of observing operations in a peacetime environment versus a wartime flight plan,” Montgomery said. “[They also] did not recognize the existing condition of decades-old planes would make phase maintenance periods hard, especially as they hit their first combat experiences in years, and did recognize the capacity limitations of Sabena.”
But Montgomery adds, “This is a Belgium issue, because Sabena was trying to conduct maintenance in a peacetime work environment while supporting a wartime customer; this is a Sabena issue because they did not recognize and publicly alert everyone that this schedule of four planes a month was un-executable . . . frankly, two planes a month was un-executable.”
One bit of good news is that the Belgian government recently announced an agreement to transfer ten of its F-16 jets to Ukraine before the end of the year. If that comes to pass, it will be helpful to the Ukrainians.
But this is only the latest promise in a string of them that have come to fruition quite slowly. Belgium first pledged 30 F-16s to Ukraine in May 2024.
Then in April 2025, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever pledged to deliver two F-16s for spare parts that year and deliver two fighter planes the following year.
Then in October 2025, Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken clarified that “the transfer of the aircraft will only take place after Ukrainian pilots have been trained and the necessary technical procedures have been completed.”
Then in May 2026, the Belgian Defense Ministry announced plans to transfer “seven F-16s in 2026 — four of which, now decommissioned, are currently being used to train Ukrainian technicians — five in 2027, fourteen in 2028, and the remaining twenty-seven aircraft in 2029,” as Belgians received F-35s.
(Oh, by the way, as of 2024, there were 340 F-16 Fighting Falcons sitting in the desert, collecting dust, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (a.k.a. The Boneyard) in Tucson, Ariz. Three-hundred forty! Almost seven times the size of the current Ukrainian Air Force’s fleet! I’m sure a lot of the ones out in the desert are in rough shape, but if you’re looking for spare parts, that’s got to be the F-16 equivalent of Home Depot.)
Lockheed Martin is talking with the Ukrainians about building them their own version of the F-16, “with longer range, a new AESA radar and stronger air defense capabilities.” That’s a fine idea, but no one has even speculated about when those new jets would be ready.
Ukraine is also scheduled to receive 16 Swedish Gripen C/D fighters with deliveries beginning in early 2027, and a separate deal that will have Ukraine purchasing 16 Gripe E fighters from Sweden. Those jets are scheduled to be delivered in early 2029.
Supporters of the Ukrainian cause have multiple reasons to be irritated with Belgium lately. Yes, the country met its NATO commitment, and spent 2 percent of their GDP on defense, for two consecutive years. (That’s nothing to sneeze at; Belgium’s GDP ranks 22nd in the world, pretty darn high for a country with less than 12 million people — more than the Chicago metro area, but less than Los Angeles or New York.)
But there are roughly $235 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets held in the EU, and about $207 billion of those are sitting in Euroclear in Brussels, Belgium. People may not realize that frozen assets sitting in European banks still collect interest, and governments still collect taxes on those frozen assets:
What did Euroclear do with this windfall? It reinvested the accumulating balances, as required by its risk-management and regulatory policies, earning roughly 5.2 billion Euros in interest income for itself in 2022 and 2023. Belgium taxed those earnings at its 25 percent corporate tax rate, generating approximately 1.3 billion euros in revenue, while Euroclear retained the remainder after costs.
The EU then decided that after Feb. 15, 2024, banks should not be allowed to keep war profits and demanded that they transfer future post-tax earnings from these cash balances to the EU to support Ukraine. Belgium continues to tax the earnings at 25 percent while most of the rest, sometimes as much as 3 billion Euros a year, goes toward helping Ukraine.
Three billion Euros a year, or $3.3 billion, is nice, but the Ukrainians would be much better off with the $235 billion sitting in those European banks.
Then there is the issue of Belgium’s purchases of Russian energy. Buying Russian oil and natural gas used to be considered a bad thing that finances Vladimir Putin’s war machine, but buying Russian energy is now official U.S. policy. From the beginning of the war to October 16 of this year, Belgium has purchased $19 billion in fossil fuels from Russia, according to the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. And as recently as July, in response to supply disruptions from the Persian Gulf, Belgium was entirely dependent upon Russian liquified natural gas. The good news is, they imported zero in August.
President Trump says a lot of absurd, false, abominable, and asinine things; this week while discussing the war casualties, he said, “They’re mostly soldiers, mostly young soldiers. Some people in a town that got hit or whatever, but mostly young soldiers. It doesn’t affect us much.” (In September, Russian attacks killed at least 328 Ukrainian civilians, bringing the United Nations calculation of total civilians killed since the start of the war past 17,600. That’s roughly six times the death toll from the 9/11 attacks.)
But a broken clock can be right twice a day, and the president has a point about the contradiction between opposing Russia’s military aggression and atrocities and putting more money into Russia by buying that country’s energy. It’s even more bizarre when you recognize that Russia’s “hybrid war” against NATO has included targets in Belgium.
ADDENDUM: Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, in an interview with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes, last night, discussing her husband, and the claims that her husband is actually her brother:
Hayes: He was — you were not related to him at all.
Omar: Not that I . . . not to my knowledge.
Hayes: There’s not some weird kernel of truth through some game of—
Omar: Not to my knowledge.
Look, I’m sure Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson would say it’s all relative, but if you’re on national television, and you get asked if you are biologically related to your spouse in any way . . . wouldn’t 99.99 percent of people say “no” and not leave any wiggle room?