Only few hundreds, of which much less are deployed, given Vanguard, and Triomphant frequent port calls.
Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner - something we cannot really claim about the US, and increasingly less so in recent years.
>Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner
Oh come on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Montenegrin_coup_d%27%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement#...
and many other gigs!
Putin does not want a strong independent ally next to Russia. He either wants puppet states such as Belarus as allies or a weak and fractured European union. For all the faults the US have they are still better allies than Russia by several lightyears.
Let me rephrase that for you from the perspective of someone who lived on Russia's doorstep for many years.
You mean to say "Maybe if we let Russia subjugate a lot more people and confine them into an evil exploitative system against their will".
That's the big difference between Europe's zone of influence and Russia's zone of influence. People want to be part of the EU (the greatest thing that ever happened to the country I was born in). People want to give their lives to not be part of Russia.
The most effective things you can do is to not force spreading the work across specific companies and countries, and not change the specs as the program goes.
Of course, the problem is how to convince European tax payers to part with the money necessary for this. Particularly as we already have two separate European projects to design next gen fighters, the UK-Italian-Swedish Tempest as well as the French-German-Spanish FCAS. Like herding cats.
I wonder what could be done to reduce the cost of developing a new top of the line fighter? More COTS components? A modular approach, which is certainly much more limited in scope in high-performance aircraft than e.g. in cars?
[1] As for China and Russia, interestingly it seems that China is poised to overtake Russia in combat aircraft development: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/whitehall...