Belgium has announced it will accelerate the delivery of surplus Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to Ukraine. Instead of delivering three flyable F-16s before the end of the year, Brussels will ship 10.

It's unclear how many will be flyable. Previously, Belgian officials explained the first seven secondhand F-16s would include just three airworthy examples. The other four would be broken down for spare parts.

It's good news for Ukraine, but hardly cause for nationwide celebration. The handful of flyable F-16s that should arrive in the coming two months could make good recent F-16 losses. But those shipping-soon Belgian F-16s won't actually grow Ukraine's F-16 fleet by much, if at all.

The dozens of supersonic F-16s in action in Ukraine fly often and fight hard. They shoot down Russian drones and cruise missiles, tangle with Russian warplanes, and lob precision glide bombs at Russian forces on the ground. Russia launched about 2,000 jet-powered drones at Ukraine in September, up from some 350 in June, and F-16s are among the few weapons fast enough to catch them, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board noted. Every 300 flying hours, each jet must go abroad for a lengthy inspection.

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The main constraint on the pace of F-16 sorties, besides maintenance demands and the availability of trained pilots, is munitions: running low or out of air-to-air missiles and glide bombs, the F-16s routinely aim their 20-mm guns at Russian targets. But even 20-mm ammunition sometimes runs low.

The busy F-16s and their equally busy pilots need reinforcement. But reinforcements are slow coming. Belgium is only slightly accelerating its F-16 shipments amid reports it will eventually give Ukraine all 53 F-16s it's gradually retiring as new Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters arrive to re-equip the Belgian air force.

Further complicating the picture, Norway's six F-16s, promised in 2023, were still being refurbished in Belgium this spring. Some arrived there in pieces.

Yes, Ukraine got 24 fight-ready F-16s from the Netherlands and most of the 19 Denmark promised. But it's lost five of those jets since 2024. And others are so worn out from relentless flying that they're badly in need of maintenance. The Belgian firm Sabena, which services Ukrainian F-16s, has struggled to keep up, and President Volodymyr Zelensky has said about half of the jets spend long stretches abroad for repairs. That slows the return of repaired planes and further squeezes the front-line force.

One wing, too few jets

In short, it's possible the Ukrainian air force's 107th Aviation Wing, its sole F-16 unit, has fewer than 40 ready-to-fight F-16s. Those 53 Belgian F-16s will help grow the wing, but piecemeal. Ukraine should expect a handful of operational jets from Belgium this year. Under a schedule from May, the last 27, half the total, may not arrive until 2029.

To be clear, additional F-16s support the 107th Aviation Wing. The Netherlands sold 18 of its old F-16s to Romania for a token price in order to equip a training squadron, funded by a consortium of Ukraine's allies, that feeds trained pilots to the 107th Aviation Wing. But these 18 jets aren't available for front-line use. They don't even legally belong to Ukraine.

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The delays in supplies of combat-ready F-16s matter because the Ukrainian air force is under stress. Its last few dozen ex-Soviet warplanes, including Mikoyan MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 fighters, are even older and wearier than the ex-European F-16s are. And they've suffered staggering losses in the air and on the ground in nearly 56 months of hard fighting in the wider war.

The air force does have a few ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000s that are at least as capable as the F-16s, but France has donated only a handful of the supersonic jets—and one has crashed. Any further supplies of Mirage 2000s could be complicated by the French presidential election in April 2027. The leading far-right and far-left parties are both friendly toward Russia and hostile to Ukraine.

Some relief is coming, although not quickly. Sweden has pledged 16 surplus JAS-39C/D Gripen fighters to the Ukrainian war effort; the first of these could arrive early next year. Later on, Ukraine also plans to buy 20 newer JAS-39E/Fs. Kyiv has also negotiated to purchase 16 new Rafale fighters from Paris, but the soonest these could arrive is 2028.

For now, F-16s are the main solution to Ukraine's air defense problems. Kyiv surely wishes it had more of them, sooner.

Bulgaria gave Ukraine 110 BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. They are 1960s vehicles, too thinly armored to carry infantry anywhere near a front line patrolled by explosive drones. So Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps found another use for them during Operation Vivaldi, its counteroffensive north of Lyman. Fill one with anti-tank mines, rig it for remote control, drive it at a Russian bunker, and set it off.

Packing potentially dozens of TM-62 anti-tank mines, the speedy BTR-60s become what's called vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or VBIEDs. Once a favorite weapon of insurgents battling US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, VBIEDs have found a new niche in Russia's wider war on Ukraine as unmanned demolition systems.

"To break through the enemy's defenses, the 3rd Army Corps employed its own invention, Soviet BTR-60s converted into robotic kamikaze complexes," the corps stated. "They were used to demolish the enemy's strongest fortifications." If an enemy strongpoint is too heavily protected to bomb from the air but exposed to attack from the ground, send in a VBIED.

The Russians were the first to deploy vehicular IEDs in the current war, but the Ukrainians may have mastered the tactic. It's one thing to rig an explosives-filled MT-LB tractor or T-55 tank to roll straight forward without direct human control, as the Russians once did. It's another to rig an explosive BTR-60 to maneuver before going off, as the 3rd Army Corps' VBIEDs clearly did.

On 28 September, announcing the close of Vivaldi's third phase, the 3rd Army Corps released drone footage depicting one of the explosive BTRs blasting a Russian strongpoint north of the town of Lyman. The sheer scale of the explosion is testimony to the VBIED's destructive potential. And the trail the BTR leaves in the grass in the heavily edited video indicates the Ukrainians can steer their VBIEDs around obstacles and guide them to precision strikes.

Why it gets there

A slow wheeled vehicle crossing open ground toward a fortified position should not survive the trip. In most sectors it would not. What makes the tactic work north of Lyman is a condition the 3rd Army Corps built into Vivaldi before its assault groups moved: Ukrainian air defense and electronic warfare threw a protective dome over the battle area, blinding Russian drones so they could not read the operation's design or strike what was moving through it.

Robots have played critical roles in each phase of Vivaldi. Surveillance drones have watched from overhead. One-way attack drones have pummeled Russian positions and supply lines. Heavy bomber drones have not only dropped bombs, they've also airlifted explosive unmanned ground vehicles into position so the UGVs can roll right through the front doors of Russian bunkers.

The self-exploding BTR-60s are too big to airlift, but that's the point. A small UGV might carry a few tens of kilograms of explosives. A remote-controlled BTR-60 can easily haul hundreds of kilograms.

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The arithmetic

It's not impossible to take out a VBIED before it strikes, of course. Mines, anti-tank missiles, and even concentrated gunfire can stop a vehicular bomb in its tracks. But losing one of the aged BTR-60s costs Ukraine very little. The vehicles are too thinly armored for use as front-line infantry transports anyway. You might as well convert them into bombs.

That is the whole case for the tactic. A manned fighter jet lobbing a precision glide bomb is the preferred approach to bunker-busting. But it costs tens of thousands of dollars an hour to keep a jet in the air, and a single glide bomb can cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's unclear how much it costs to convert a BTR into a VBIED. It could be just a few thousand.

And it reduces Russian fortifications without risking any Ukrainian lives. That's the philosophy underpinning all of the 3rd Army Corps' robot-first tactics. "This is exactly the direction of the corps' development set by Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi," the corps stated, "to reduce the number of fighters in the most dangerous areas and replace them with robots."

Vivaldi began in mid-April under an information blackout that held for five months. The corps says it has regained control of 176 sq km across three of a planned four phases, around half of that de-occupied outright, and taken more than 250 Russian prisoners. Those figures are the corps' own and have not been independently verified.

Sometimes the robots doing that work are 60-year-old APCs modified for an explosive one-way mission.

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1960s-vintage, Soviet-made T-62Ms aren't the oldest tanks in the Ukrainian inventory. That dubious honorific belongs to Ukraine's ex-Slovenian M-55S tanks, which are based on Soviet-made T-55s from the 1950s.

The T-62M hasn't gotten better. The job has changed. These days, many tanks on both sides function as mobile artillery, angling their guns high to fire a few rounds at targets kilometers away. They rarely work as tanks, closing with the enemy and firing directly from a few hundred meters. The threat from tiny explosive drones has pushed armor back from the gray zone, and at that distance a T-62M is not much less effective than a T-64BV. Or, for that matter, than a far more precious Leopard 1, Leopard 2, or M-1.

That is one reading of a war that has changed shape, and nobody has published a study of it. Ukraine's T-64, Leopard, and Abrams fleets have all taken heavy documented losses. Oryx, which logs a loss only where photos or video exist, lists no Ukrainian T-62Ms at all.

These tanks, all captured from the Russians, are also available. And that matters in a military struggling to sustain its tank force. As Russia's war on Ukraine grinds through its 56th month, Ukraine is running low on its newest and best tanks. Older and less capable ones fill in ... for lack of a better alternative.

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Observer Stevius, who closely tracks developments in the Ukrainian armor corps, recently highlighted the ongoing importance of former Russian T-62Ms to the Ukrainian war effort. "Captured T-62Ms still out there!"

Specifically, Stevius noted an ex-Russian T-62M belonging to the Ukrainian National Guard's 19th Brigade participating in a recent competition for best tank crew in the National Guard. According to Stevius, at least two other Ukrainian units have operated the survivors of at least 45 T-62Ms that Ukrainian troops have captured. Most of the captures took place during the Ukrainian counteroffensives in eastern and southern Ukraine in late 2022.

Lesser tanks

The 40-ton, four-person T-62M is Ukraine's second-oldest tank, and where the slightly older M-55S got a deep upgrade in 1990s Slovenia, the T-62M has not. In its DNA it is still a vehicle of the early Cold War. The Ukrainian army's 110th Mechanized Brigade temporarily operated T-62Ms before swapping them out for much newer and more capable T-64BVs. Where the T-62M has a 115-millimeter main gun loaded by hand by a fourth crew member, the T-64BV has a more powerful 125-millimeter gun loaded by a fast mechanical autoloader.

The fast-firing capability of the made-in-Ukraine T-64BV was central to the Ukrainian 1st Tank Brigade's successful defense of the city of Chernihiv during the early weeks of the wider Russian invasion starting in February 2022. The Ukrainian tanks engaged passing Russian tanks at point-blank range, and out-shot them.

That is the kind of fight the T-62M would lose. It is a kind of fight fewer tanks now get.

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Surely some of the 60-something-year-old T-62Ms in Ukrainian service have been withdrawn owing to wear and tear and a possible shortage of spare parts. But there's a good chance most of the 45 Ukrainian T-62Ms are still in, or near, the action.

But not all are still tanks. Seeing the value in the thickly protected hull and reliable chassis that carries the T-62M's turret and gun, Ukrainian volunteers and units have converted some captured T-62Ms into specialist vehicles that benefit from the tanks' sturdy bottoms but don't need their obsolescent tops.

A few ex-Russian T-62Ms have undergone conversion into recovery vehicles by losing their turrets and guns and adding a heavy-duty winch for towing other armored vehicles. Volunteers working with the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation turned another into a heavy infantry fighting vehicle. The recipe is simple. Just pop off the existing turret and replace it with a smaller one fitted with a 30-millimeter autocannon, in this case one pulled from a captured Russian BMP-2.

Potentially dozens of Ukrainian T-62Ms are still T-62Ms, however, and still adding bulk and firepower to units that otherwise might struggle to deploy any tanks at all.