This sounds wildly implausible, or at least very exaggerated.
I've worked on jets. If you put them in pieces, you are talking months (at least 3-6), to put them back together. Modern jets aren't Legos. They are very complex machines that require testing and fine tuning.
Most flight surface controls and engines parts have flight hour limits that are painstakingly logged so preventative maintenance maximizes service lifetime. When we transferred jets, we also delivered their maintenance history.
When we mothball aircraft, we only remove certain components and basically seal it up. To take it out of mothball and reassemble it, under normal circumstances, you are talking 8 months.
Maybe they surreptitiously transferred aircraft to Ukraine, I can believe that. But if they broke them down into individual parts and said, "Here you go!", the proper response would be, "Go fuck yourself."
I imagine this story started out one way and has just been embellished each telling.
Maybe they just rolled the jets there, took the hubcaps of the fuel inlet off of every one of them (so that they are "disassembled") and then let ukraine know.
So still technically correct and within international arms trade law, but the jets got through without needing too much reassembly.
Maybe put some clingwrap or something over the inlet so moisture doesn't get in.
This reminds me of the beginning of lend lease. Where the us and Canada built a few air strips in the middle of nowhere that just happened to straddle the border.
American factory pilot would fly brand new fighter plane and land carefully on the neutral American side of the runway and drive away.
Somehow, the now abandoned salvage property would get towed to the other side
British pilot in Dominion of Canada gets in and flies to United Kingdom.
Itâs written in the Nitter link but Poland wanted the backing of the US in the event Russia would attack Poland. They wanted it to be an âAlliedâ decision as opposed to just a Polish decision.
Same reason even major powers like Germany coordinate with the US when it comes to giving Ukraine weapons: the US is the only country in the world at the moment that is completely invincible, so having it share the responsibility is a good idea