As hundreds of Russian missiles and drones streaked across Ukraine on Monday, the Ukrainian fighter pilot known as Moonfish was exactly where he had said he always wanted to be: in the cockpit of an F-16 giving chase.
“The F-16 is a Swiss Army knife,” the pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, told reporters while training on the warplane last fall. “It’s a very good weapon that can carry out any mission.”
Colonel Mes helped lead Ukraine’s intense lobbying effort to secure the F-16 fighter jets, a half-dozen of which joined the fight against Russia earlier this month. And he was among the dozen or so pilots trained to fly the sophisticated warplane in combat.
After shooting down three Russian cruise missiles and one attack drone in Monday’s assault, he was racing to intercept yet another target when ground control lost communication with his aircraft, Ukrainian Air Force officials said.
“The plane crashed, the pilot died,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.
The death of a widely celebrated pilot and the loss of one of the long-coveted fighter jets so soon after their deployment cast a pall over the battlefield just as the giddy first days of the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region were fading away and concerns mounted over an advancing Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
As the nation mourned the death of the pilot, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine dismissed the head of the country’s Air Force and promised a thorough investigation of the incident, including the possibility raised by a Western official on Friday that it was the result of friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery.
But on Saturday, two senior U.S. military officials said that friendly fire was probably not the cause of the F-16 downing, and that American and Ukrainian investigators were looking at a variety of possibilities.
“The loss of a pilot is incredibly painful to bear, especially as he was among those who fought for Ukraine’s right to have F-16 aircraft,” said Anatolii Khrapchynskyi, a pilot and former Ukrainian Air Force officer.
“Regarding the aircraft, it’s important to understand that this is war, and unfortunately, losses are inevitable,” he said. “We are fighting a state that can launch over 200 weapons at Ukraine in a single strike, including cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and combat drones.”
Ukraine has swathed its F-16 program in secrecy, as both the airplanes and the pilots are prized targets for the Russians. In early August, in an effort to lift the nation’s morale, the new warplanes flew over television cameras and were shown maneuvering on the apron of an airfield.
Lt. Gen. Anatoliy Kryvonozhka, who was named the acting commander of the Air Force after the dismissal of Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, said in an interview earlier this month that battle-hardened pilots like Colonel Mes were given priority to train on the advanced Western jets.
“They were shot at, they came through fights,” he said. “People who have gone through these episodes, they respond correctly” to emergencies, he said. “This combat experience will apply to new types of planes.”
When friends and family gathered to bury Colonel Mes on Thursday, one of his teachers said he knew what he wanted to do from a young age.
“I asked him, ‘What do you want to be?’” the teacher, Nadiia Mushtyn, said. “‘Actually, I dream of being a pilot,’” she said he replied, adding: “His dream came true.”
A former Republican House member, Adam Kinzinger, recalled meeting Colonel Mes when he came to Washington to lobby for the F-16s with another pilot, Major Andriy Pilshchykov, who died in a crash a year ago.
“They knew the risks, understood the stakes, and yet, they never hesitated,” he wrote in a tribute published on Substack. “They were young, full of life, and yet carried a maturity beyond their years — a maturity forged in the fires of war.”
Ukrainian military analysts said it was far too soon to speculate about what caused the crash. But they emphasized that Western air defense systems and F-16 fighter jets have never worked together in conditions as complex as the circumstances in Ukraine on Monday.
At the same time that Colonel Mes was chasing Russian missiles, teams manning three different defensive systems, including the Patriot missiles, as well as mobile groups with Stinger missiles and British Starstreak missiles, were all working to intercept the 127 missiles and 109 one-way attack drones, the Ukrainian Air Force said.
“Many things could have led to the loss of the F-16, including the technical condition of the plane, pilot error, external factors,” said Mr. Khrapchynskyi, the former Ukraine Air Force official.
For instance, he said, it was possible that fragments of a destroyed missile could have hit a vital part of the plane. “At this moment of the investigation, all versions are being considered, including friendly fire,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky did not offer a reason for his dismissal of the Air Force commander beyond saying his administration was taking every step it could to protect the lives of soldiers and civilians.
But one pilot, who asked not to be identified because he was on active duty and was not permitted to speak about operational matters, said “the structure of aviation management in Ukraine is outdated.” Yet it would be wrong to place all the blame on the former commander, he said, who had a background in air defense and performed his job capably.
The problems run deeper than that, he said, and relate to a command structure steeped in bureaucracy that too often rewards those who do not question authority and whose thinking may be outdated.
“Pilots have a variety of tasks, even on the ground, and bureaucracy is the cancer of aviation,” he said. “Today, I’ve been writing and typing all morning, following Soviet-era manuals.”
Andrew E. Kramer, Anastasia Kuznietsova, Eric Schmitt and Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting.
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