It appears the idea is to fund this using frozen Russian funds in EU. Zelenskyy and Kristersson (Swedish PM) both made a point of saying they are travelling to Brussels tonight to attempt to make this happen. (I watched the press conference stream from Saab/Linköping. It's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF6PUxSPEKU)
Good: the Gripen is a fantastic plane and I'm happy that Saab is making sales of this platform. If it were not for the economic terrorism/influence of the US then Saab would be selling a lot more of these planes to countries who are currently being forced into buying the F-35.
Bad: this is likely to cause an escalation in tensions in the Ukraine-Russia situation.
Russia has nowhere to escalate, it can only start dropping nukes, but that will piss off China and India. Not because they would be so worried about Ukrainians, but because Russia would degrade nuclear weapons from strategic asset into a tactical weapons on level of Iskander.
And Russian war industry very much stands on Chinese dual use imports. Without them, their capacity to produce drones would be non existent - Shaheds are using parts from China, fiber spools are coming from China....
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] threadBad: this is likely to cause an escalation in tensions in the Ukraine-Russia situation.
And they will need an air force.
And it seems natural that they seek alternatives from buying airplanes from the Moscow state.
And even if they wanted to buy airplanes from the Kremlin, they may very well refuse to sell.
As a Swede I can tell you my country will support Ukraine until victory. Russia can stop the escalation be getting the hell out of Ukraine.
And Russian war industry very much stands on Chinese dual use imports. Without them, their capacity to produce drones would be non existent - Shaheds are using parts from China, fiber spools are coming from China....