WSJ: Ukraine has lost its best pilots even before the delivery of F-16 fighter jets
Ukraine has lost its best pilots even before the delivery of F-16 fighter jets, The Wall Street Journal writes.
‘By the time the country received the F-16s, many of Ukraine’s best pilots, like a pilot with the call sign Dzhus, had already died,’ the piece said.
The journalists also pointed out that Ukrainian pilot Oleksiy Mes, who recently died while piloting an F-16, as well as a pilot with the call sign Dzhus, who died in the Zhytomyr region during a training flight, were in favour of transferring Western fighter jets to Ukraine.
On 29 August, the AFU General Staff acknowledged the loss of the F-16 fighter jet transferred to Ukraine, and a special commission is investigating the causes of the crash. The Wall Street Journal earlier wrote that the plane crashed due to pilot error. Rada MP Maryana Bezuglaya said that the F-16 was shot down by the AFU’s Patriot SAMs due to a violation of coordination between the units.
As follows from the obituary of Ukrainian pilot Oleksiy Mesya, he died on 26 August during a combat mission. At the same time, the coordinator of the pro-Russian underground Sergei Lebedev reported on 27 August that a strike on the area of the military airfield in Starokonstantinov, Khmelnitsky region, hit a facility where AFU pilots being trained by foreign instructors were stationed.
Already on 30 August, Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Air Force, Mykola Oleshchuk. The reasons for the dismissal were not specified, but on 31 August Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov commented on the dismissal, calling it a ‘rotation’ unrelated to the crash of the F-16 fighter jet.