Equipping Ukraine with F-16s could trigger nuclear war

NATO member states are currently training Ukrainian pilots to operate the F-16s ahead of the expected delivery. Kiev has been asking for Western fighter jets for months, saying it needs them to counter Russia's air superiority.
“A nuclear conflict that broke out without cause, unintentionally, is not something that can be ruled out, that is why all the intrigues around Ukraine are dangerous,” Medvedev said in a wide-ranging interview with Russian journalists, quoted by TASS on February 22. The deputy head of the Russian National Security Council suggested that US-designed aircraft could be the trigger, noting that Kiev wants them even though it has no ground infrastructure to operate them. “So if one of those planes takes off from a NATO country (on a mission involving Ukraine) – what would it be? An attack on Russia. I will not describe what could happen next,” he said. “Such a development may not even be approved by the NATO and US leadership.”
Russian officials have previously warned that supplying F-16s to Ukraine would be problematic because the planes can deploy nuclear gravity bombs.
Mr Medvedev said the confrontation between Russia and the US and its allies was not such that it would force people to hide in nuclear shelters, but described it as worse than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He added that the doomsday clock was “running” and had “accelerated significantly”. The doomsday clock – a representation of the likelihood of global catastrophe maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – now has 90 seconds to midnight, having advanced by 10 seconds last year. The clock was first introduced in 1947, when it was set at 11:53 p.m. Its most optimistic date was in the 1990s, when it was 17 minutes to midnight. The current date is the closest it has ever been to midnight or ‘doomsday’./.