Signal No. 70 · Gripen as industrial policy

At a joint press conference at the Uppland Air Wing (F16) in Uppsala on 28 May, with two Gripens on the tarmac, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a two-track fighter package. Ukraine intends to procure up to 20 new Gripen E/F, allocating €2.5bn from the EU's €90bn Ukraine Support Loan — ratified by the Verkhovna Rada the same day, 298 votes to a 226 threshold, with first EU disbursements due in June; Sweden will additionally donate up to 16 older Gripen C/D as bilateral assistance, conditional on Ukraine signing the E/F purchase, with first deliveries targeted for early 2027 and Zelensky citing a ten-month horizon. Saab cautioned it has not yet signed a contract or received an order for the E/F — what was concluded on 28 May is a political declaration, with negotiations ongoing toward a final agreement. The deal builds on the October 2025 letter of intent framing a 100–150-aircraft programme, with Ukrainian pilot and technician training already under way and localised Gripen production in Ukraine envisaged from 2033. It forms part of what Sweden calls its largest military support package to date, spanning long-range capabilities, ammunition and electronic warfare. Saab shares rose over 4%.

The Gripen is built around dispersed basing — Sweden's Bas 90 doctrine of road-strip operations and ten-minute conscript turnarounds — but Ukraine already disperses its F-16s, scrambling and recovering across scattered sites with truck-based mobile complexes — the dispersed-basing-versus-sustainment trade-off this publication weighed across the F-16, Gripen and Mirage a year ago. What actually keeps Ukrainian fast jets out of the fight is not their bases but the air above them. Russia has built a wall over the front: long-range S-400 batteries on the ground, and Su-35 and MiG-31 fighters carrying the R-37M, a missile that has killed Ukrainian aircraft beyond 175km — well past the reach of the AMRAAM the F-16 fires back with. The effect is that Ukraine's F-16s and Mirages have to fly low and stay far behind the line, where they do useful work against drones and cruise missiles but cannot contest the airspace over the front itself. The Gripen E is built for precisely this fight: its Raven ES-05 AESA radar, Skyward-G infrared search-and-track and stronger electronic-warfare suite would give Ukraine, for the first time, a fighter that can detect, out-range and survive against a Russian fighter rather than fly low and far to avoid one. What it does not change is the ground threat — a non-stealthy jet, however good its radar, still cannot loiter under the S-400 belt — so the E wins the air-to-air problem without on its own dissolving the air-denial one. The catch is timing. That aircraft is a 2030s delivery, limited by Saab's output of roughly 20–30 a year. The jets arriving first — 16 donated C/D from 2027 — are the older variant, shipping with the mechanically-scanned PS-05/A radar; Saab has flight-tested a fixed AESA array for the C/D, but it lacks the roll-repositioning wide field-of-regard of the E's Raven, and Ukraine's donated jets are not slated to receive even that. They can be delivered with the same Meteor missile, and that — the weapon, not the airframe — is the real near-term gain: a missile that outranges anything Ukraine flies today, far enough to push back the Su-34s that lob glide bombs at Ukrainian positions from stand-off range. What the C/D lacks is the E's sensor, not its shot, so it is the variant less suited to the long-range duel against Russian fighters even as it carries the missile that duel turns on.

Under SAFE rules a single member state must sign its purchase agreements by the end of May or buy jointly with another participant thereafter. Poland, the first of nineteen beneficiaries to sign (8 May) and the largest allocation at €43.7bn, used the deadline to lock in its access: Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on 28 May that some 100bn zlotys (about $27bn) had been committed across roughly forty agreements, spanning tanks, artillery and air defence, with the bulk spent domestically. The drawdown went through over a presidential veto — President Karol Nawrocki blocked the enabling law, and Tusk's government routed the funds through the state development bank BGK and the Armed Forces Support Fund to proceed regardless.

Rome reached the same deadline pulling the other way. Italy's €14.9bn allocation is the third-largest in the programme, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warning that, absent comparable fiscal flexibility for energy-crisis spending, it would be hard to justify drawing on SAFE at all — tying her threat directly to the energy shock from the closed Strait of Hormuz. Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, who has pressed the Treasury twice to take the loans, is openly at odds with her; Italian press reported a furious cabinet argument. The decision falls due as the single-country window closes.