The Ukrainian military claimed early on Tuesday to have shot down three Russian fighter jets and a cruise missile, an assertion that was backed up by several loud explosions in the night sky over Kyiv — and a sign that its air defence systems and air force are still functioning nearly two weeks into the war.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has issued increasingly urgent pleas for western support for his country’s air defences. Zelensky has asked western countries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, an idea rebuffed by Nato because it risked direct conflict with Russia.

The US, however, has been coordinating a possible arrangement in which eastern European countries would send Soviet-designed fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for American F-16s. Ukrainian pilots would not need additional training to fly the MiG aircraft, if they could be flown or trucked across the border into Ukraine.

Thick and low cloud cover over the northern parts of Ukraine in the early days of the war have limited the effectiveness of Russian bombing and air support for troops on the ground.

At the same time, Russia’s armoured columns have slowed, apparently bogged down by a mix of logistical glitches and Ukrainian airstrikes, artillery attacks and ambushes using anti-tank missiles.

The prospect of clearing skies, and a possible Russian shift to using air power to compensate for the lack of progress on the ground, have given new urgency to Zelensky’s requests. That Ukraine’s air force has survived for two weeks is seen by western military analysts as something of a success.

“We will close the sky ourselves,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement Tuesday morning about the downing of the Russian planes. “Nato is invited” to help, it added.

The military had said earlier that an anti-aircraft missile shot down a Russian fighter jet over Kyiv, the capital, around 8:30pm (local time) on Monday. In the city centre around that time, air raid sirens wailed before a series of thunderous booms in the sky.

The Ukrainian military said that about half an hour later, one of its interceptor jets shot down a Russian fighter jet in aerial combat near the capital. Air-to-air combat has been exceedingly rare in modern war, with only a tiny number of incidents in decades — between Russia and Turkey in Syria and in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Another Ukrainian pilot shot down a cruise missile.

Ukrainian military statements have typically included only scant information about failures and losses in the war.

New York Times News Service