Not long after Ukrainian President Zelenskyy claimed that Ukraine’s shiny—though not so new—F-16s made their combat debut defending Ukraine from Vladimir Putin’s cruise missiles and drones, the regime confirmed that one of them had crashed and the pilot killed. “A top Ukrainian pilot was killed when a U.S.-made F-16 fighter jet crashed on Monday, just weeks after the long-awaited planes arrived in the country,” CNN reported Aug. 29, citing a Ukrainian military source. “The Ukrainian Defense Forces do not believe pilot error was behind the incident, the source added. Pilot Oleksiy Mes, known as ‘Moonfish,’ was killed in the crash while ‘repelling the biggest ever aerial attack’ by Russia against Ukraine, said the source, adding that the pilot was buried on Thursday.” The loss was confirmed by the Ukrainian general staff yesterday.
“The death of the pilot is a major blow for Ukraine,” CNN notes. “The first F-16s only arrived in the country earlier this month and Moonfish was one of the few pilots trained to fly them.”
But there seems to be some dispute about the cause of the crash. Russian Telegram channels circulated rumors following the Russian strikes claiming that two F-16s may have been destroyed on the ground, but the Russian Defense Ministry has made no such claim. Other speculations for what happened to “Moonfish” making the rounds include that the F-16 nosedived during a sortie, attempting to shoot down Russian missiles and that the F-16 and its pilot are simply meeting the same fate as the M1 Abrams tanks supplied by the U.S. to Ukraine last year—also advertised as the salvation of Kiev.
Ukrainian Rada deputy Mariana Bezuglaya suggests that Western technical ineptitude is behind the loss of the plane and pilot. “According to my information, the F-16 piloted by Oleksiy ‘Moonfish’ Mes was hit by a Patriot anti-aircraft missile system due to discoordination between units,” Bezuglaya wrote on Telegram, reported RT. She noted that all official reports thus far insist he merely “lost control.… War is war, such episodes are possible. But a culture of lies … leads to a management system for military decisions that does not improve based on truthful, consistently collected analytics, but worsens and even collapses, as seen in the Pokrovsk direction,” she added, referring to Russia’s recent advance toward the Donbass city of Pokrovsk. Bezuglaya has a history of critical public comments and has been placed on the Myrotvorets hit list.
Zelenskyy, anxious to find someone to blame for this major loss of the equipment and of one of the few Ukrainian pilots qualified to fly the plane, fired the head of the Ukrainian Air Force. The turnover in the Ukrainian military command is looking more and more like “The Apprentice.”
Of some note is that the U.S. upgraded the Ukrainian F-16s with an advanced electronic warfare system prior to their delivery, giving rise to the theory that they could have neglected to provide the codes for the identification-friend-or-foe (IFF) system that would have prevented the Patriot system from locking on to Mes’s plane, reported Avia.pro.