Sweden's Saab signs $2.5 bln deal to supply Ukraine with 16 new Gripen E fighters

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Publication date: 2026-07-05 14:23:57

Saab SK 35C Draken (DragonKite) SE-DXP810.

Summary and Key Points

Saab signed a contract on June 30 to supply Ukraine with 16 new-build JAS 39 Gripen E fighters. The deal is worth approximately $2.5 billion under an October framework that could eventually reach 150 aircraft. Deliveries are scheduled for 2029 and 2030, financed through the European Union’s Ukraine loan facility. Additionally, 16 donated Gripen C/Ds from Swedish stocks will arrive from early 2027. The Gripen is the fifth generation of Saab’s fighter lineage, following the Saab 29 Tunnan, the Saab 32 Lansen, the Saab 35 Draken, and the Saab 37 Viggen. This represents a 78-year run of Swedish designs built around dispersed highway basing, rapid turnaround, and licensed engines, most recently General Electric’s F414.

Introduction: Saab Was Ready for a Russia War

JAS 39 Gripen on Runway. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

On June 30, Saab signed the contract: 16 Gripen E fighters for Ukraine, worth about $2.5 billion. This is the first firm order under a framework that could reach 150 aircraft. Every line of the sales pitch—a jet that flies from highways, hides in forests, and gets rearmed by minimally trained crews in ten minutes—was written decades ago, for a Soviet invasion of Sweden that never happened.

Four Cold War fighters built that doctrine before the Gripen existed, and almost nobody outside Sweden remembers them. The war those jets were designed for finally arrived. It just wasn’t Sweden’s.

The signing happened in the presence of Ukraine’s president and Sweden’s defense minister. It converted last October’s letter of intent into steel: 16 new-build Gripen Es, roughly SEK 24.6 billion, with deliveries in 2029 and 2030, financed through the European Union’s Ukraine loan facility. Saab chief executive Micael Johansson called it “a world-class fighter that will transform the Ukrainian Air Force’s capability.”

Sixteen donated Gripen C/Ds from Swedish stocks arrive far sooner, beginning in early 2027. Ukrainian pilots and technicians are already training in Sweden. The October framework contemplates 100 to 150 aircraft, which would rank among the largest fighter exports in Saab’s history.

A company from a nation of ten million outselling giants is a strange enough story. The stranger one is how long it took the world to want what Sweden was building. The Gripen is the fifth act of a lineage that spent the Cold War producing some of the most inventive fighters ever flown, for an audience of one country, against an invasion that never came.

Saab 29 Tunnan: The Flying Barrel That Went to War for the UN

Saab J-29 Tunnan. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The lineage’s founding jet looked like a joke and flew like a threat. The Saab 29 Tunnan—the Flying Barrel, named for the rotund fuselage wrapped around its de Havilland Ghost engine—first flew on September 1, 1948. It became the first swept-wing fighter produced in Western Europe after the war, putting neutral Sweden in the same technological generation as the F-86 and the MiG-15.

Saab built 661 of them. The type set a world speed record over a closed circuit in 1954, and its landing gear was designed from the start for rough strips. This was the first expression of the assumption that would define every Swedish fighter after it: the real runways would not survive the first morning of a war.

Then the Tunnan did something no other Swedish fighter ever has. It went to war.

When the United Nations appealed for airpower during the Congo crisis, Sweden sent J 29Bs to form UN Fighter Squadron 22. The first four jets landed at Leopoldville on October 4, 1961, eventually joined by reinforcements and two reconnaissance variants. Their war escalated from escorting UN transports to offensive strikes. On December 9, 1961, the Tunnans and Indian Canberra bombers hit the Katangese airfields at Kolwezi and Jadotville and knocked out most of Katanga’s small air arm on the ground. The fiercest fighting came a year later when the squadron flew rocket attacks in support of besieged UN ground troops.

Despite heavy ground fire, not one was lost in combat. The ending is a detailed history that should be kept: when the mission wound down, Sweden judged it too expensive to fly the jets home and scrapped several of them on-site in Africa. The only Swedish fighters ever to fire shots in anger never came back.

Saab 32 Lansen: The Missile Pioneer That Outlived Everything

The second act rarely makes anyone’s list, which is an injustice with numbers attached.

The requirement behind the Saab 32 Lansen, first flown on November 3, 1952, was brutally Swedish: a strike aircraft able to attack any point along the country’s 1