by DAVID AXE
Ukraine has lost another Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter and its pilot. The Thursday shoot-down extends the steady attrition of the Ukrainian air force MiG fleet, potentially drawing down the fleet to its pre-war strength.
That means Ukraine may have lost as many of the twin-engine, supersonic MiG-29s as it has received from its allies or restored from surplus stocks since February 2022.
It’s an ominous milestone. The Soviet-vintage MiG-29 is no longer the Ukrainian air force’s most important fighter. That honorific belongs to the air force’s ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16s.
But the MiG-29 is still the air force’s second most important fighter—and will remain so through 2027 as Ukraine awaits its first ex-Swedish Saab Gripens, due early next year, and French-made Dassault Rafales, due from 2028. Ukraine sorties MiG-29s for ground attack missions targeting Russian troop concentrations, strikes on Russian air defense systems, and air defense sorties over Ukrainian cities and ports.
The air force announced the loss of the MiG-29 and its pilot, Capt. Marat Mambetov, shortly after it occurred on Thursday. Mambetov, 25, was a flight commander in the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade, known as the “Ghost of Kyiv” brigade. “Flying a MiG-29 fighter jet, [Mambetov] carried out missile and bomb strikes against Russian occupiers along one of the front-line directions,” the air force stated. “During the mission, his aircraft was hit by an enemy missile. The pilot ejected, but tragically did not survive.”
It’s the 37th confirmed combat loss of a Ukrainian MiG-29 since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, according to a tally by the Oryx open-source intelligence collective. Oryx has also registered damage to an additional three Ukrainian MiG-29s.
Thirty-seven write-offs, plus the likely grounding of several previously flyable MiG-29s owing to intensive wear and tear since 2022, may have reduced the Ukrainian air force’s MiG-29 fleet to around three dozen active jets.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
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…gripens are coming very soon