F-35 isn't supposed to be a fighter anyway. Its basically flying recon and artillery. In theory it should be operating outside the range of your air defense.

Admittedly, in practice...

Either way, the premise of Western hype around Ukraine was that Russia's military was so completely sclerotic, even a rag tag band of high schoolers with pluck and moxy could defeat them.

So "The Ghost of Kyiv" could shoot down six planes in thirty minutes because Russians were sitting ducks. And the Russian war machine would grind to a halt because nobody in the military knew how to move fuel to the front lines. And then Vladimir Putin would die of embarrassment for even dreaming of challenging the West. And everyone would clap.

All fiction.