Historic Win: a Ukrainian F-16 pilot won a record-breaking victory against Russia

Ukraine received its initial fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons in the summer of 2024 and swiftly achieved major combat successes against Russian forces. In December 2024, a Ukrainian pilot set a new record during a mission.

A Ukrainian F-16 pilot downed 6 Russian cruise missiles during a combat mission in December 2024 according to reports that only surfaced weeks late. This feat set a historic record for the fighter jet’s effectiveness. 

"For the first time in the history of the Fighting Falcon, an F-16 fighter jet destroyed six Russian cruise missiles in one combat mission," the Ukrainian Air Force Command wrote on social media on January 7th, 2025, according to a translation by The Kyiv Independent. 

Photo Credit: Facebook @kpszsu

The missile interceptions reportedly took place during a single sortie on the morning of December 13th, 2024. Russian forces had launched a large-scale aerial attack that saw 200 drones and 94 cruise missiles deployed against targets in Ukraine. 

"They say that even Americans couldn't believe you did it," the Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said during an interview with the pilot who downed the Russian six cruise missiles.

Two of the Russian cruise missiles were shot down using medium-range missiles while another two were downed with short-range missiles. The remaining missiles were taken out with the F-16’s cannon while it was low on fuel. 

Photo Credit: Facebook @kpszsu

"A few bursts from the cannon — and an explosion... then another one! 'A secondary detonation,' I thought, but, as it turned out, there were two missiles," the pilot said about the last missiles while explaining he had done what he was taught by U.S. trainers. 

Photo Credit: Facebook @kpszsu

The Kyiv Independent could not independently verify the Ukrainian Air Force’s claims at the time, but those claims were in line with other reports of the F-16’s effectiveness as an air defense tool against Russian air target threats over Ukraine. 

Russia has launched a series of deadly and massive air attacks against Ukraine that have included a significant number of cruise missiles in recent months. However, many of these missiles have been intercepted by Ukraine's air defense and a lot have been shot down by the country's fleet of F-16s.

For example, on November 29th, during an interview with British channel Sky News, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed the nation's F-16s had proven their effectiveness in combating Russian air threats.

"How do F-16s work today? Very good. Excellent, mostly. We have a very [small] number of F-16s. What do they do now? They destroyed seven cruise missiles two nights ago. Seven missiles that [targeted] civilian infrastructure," Zelensky explained according to Ukrainska Pravda.

As previously stated, on December 13th, Russia launched what many in the media called one of the largest aerial assaults on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. At least 200 drones and 94 missiles were launched at targets in Ukraine.

According to The Kyiv Independent, Zelensky later revealed that 81 of the missiles launched by Russia were shot down, 11 of which were intercepted by f-16 pilots. We now know that 6 of those 11 downed missiles were taken out by a single pilot. This has been a story that's repeated itself since Ukraine's F-16s scored their first big victory in August 2024.

Shortly after arriving in the country, Ukraine's F-16s reportedly shot down their first cruise missiles during a Russian air assault that took place early in the morning on August 27th according to Forbes.

Ukrainian F-16s scored another major recent victory over Moscow during a large-scale Russian missile assault that took place in mid-November, a feat that solidified their perception as an effective air defense asset. 

On the night of November 16th to the 17th, Russia launched a massive aerial attack on Ukraine that saw about 120 missiles and 90 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) launched at targets across the country according to data from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. 

Russia fired everything from its vaunted 3M22 Zircon hypersonic ship missile and Kalibr cruise missiles to its Iskander-M ballistic missile and 47M2 Kinzhal aeroballistic missile at targets in Ukraine, Militarnyi reported. 

Of the 210 missiles and drones launched by Russia, Ukrainian air defense forces were able to shoot down 144 different targets, and Kyiv’s F-16 fighter jets proved essential to the downing of at least 10 of these targets.

According to a social media post from President Zelensky at the time, F-16 pilots “shot down about ten air targets.” Zelensky also provided video footage showing some of the damage the Russian attack had wrought. 

“The aftermath of the combined attack on our infrastructure in the Rivne, Lviv, Dnipro, Volyn, and Odesa regions are being eliminated,” Zelensky wrote alongside the images. 

Photo Credit: X @ZelenskyyUa

Militarnyi has reported that Ukrainian F-16s have become an “effective addition” to Ukraine’s air defense network since arriving in the country in the summer of 2024. 

Ukrainian F-16 pilots are using a combination of the American-made short-range AIM-9 missile and the medium-range AIM-120 missile to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles to great effect according to Militarnyi. This is why they've become so effective at downing missiles. 

The combination of short and medium-range missiles provides Ukrainian F-16 pilots with “a wide range of air combat capabilities at various ranges, ensuring enemy targets’ interception both beyond the line of sight and in close air combat,” Militarnyi explained. 

F-16s are also equipped with a 20-mm six-barrel M61 Vulcan cannon that has a total of 512 rounds of ammunition that can be used against incoming targets but added that the AIM-9X missile was the weapon most likely to be used to intercept missiles and drones. 

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Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By MathKnight and Zachi Evenor, Own Work, CC BY 4.0