A recently published Reuters article suggests that the upshot of the donation and sale of 36 Saab JAS 39 Gripen jets to Kyiv is that Sweden has now become the backbone of the Ukrainian air force in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.
This new military-industrial posture has radical defence consequences.
Although London, Paris, and Berlin are supplying advanced weapons systems to Kyiv — Mirage jets, Leopard tanks, and the British-French Storm Shadow missile — this is a collective multinational effort in which exposure is spread thin and responsibility diluted.
Sweden has embraced the opposite strategy.
If, in the near future, a Eurofighter Typhoon shoots down a Russian fighter jet, Moscow’s war planners face a difficult question. Against which of the four countries that designed, built, and funded that aircraft should they respond: one of them, all four, or none?
If, on the other hand, a Swedish JAS 39 Gripen fires a possibly nuclear-tipped Ukrainian missile at a target deep inside Russia, and Moscow wants to deny its enemy the capability to do so again in the future, the list of return addresses to which it could dispatch its hypersonic missiles is painfully short.
Swedish Arms Manufacturing — Then and Now
Until rather recently, Sweden’s defence industry has been a winning formula tied to 200 years of peace and neutrality: world-class weapons systems, friends in every direction and nobody’s enemy.
Since the end of the war in 1945, is there any European politician who has expressed themselves in public in the way that Sweden’s Social Democratic former prime minister Magdalena Andersson recently did in the debate about French nuclear weapons in Europe: “Even today Europe does have nuclear weapons, so we can bomb Russia to smithereens”.