Ukraine’s General Staff has confirmed that a Western-supplied F-16 fighter jet has been lost along with its pilot.
A handful of the US-made aircraft were delivered to Ukraine earlier this month. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, meanwhile, confirmed on Tuesday that the jets had seen action during a massive Russian missile attack the day before.
“Contact was lost with one of the planes as it followed a target. As it turned out, the plane crashed and the pilot died,” the General Staff said in a statement on Thursday evening.
The Defense Ministry in Kiev has established a special commission to investigate the incident. A source within the Ukrainian Air Force told Voice of America that among the options currently being examined are pilot error, technical malfunction, and “friendly fire” from Ukrainian air defenses.
Earlier in the day, the Wall Street Journal and CNN reported that one of the Ukrainian F-16s was “destroyed in a crash on Monday,” one citing a US official and the other a source in Kiev. There were conflicting reports on whether pilot error was to blame.
The fallen pilot was identified as Aleksey Mes, callsign ‘Moonfish’, one of just a handful of Ukrainian pilots trained in the West to fly F-16s. His death was first revealed by an obituary posted on social media by a councilman in Mes' home town of Lutsk.
Mes and one of his squadron mates, Andrey ‘Juice’ Pilshchikov, were the faces of Ukraine’s campaign to acquire the F-16s, giving multiple interviews to Western media. Pilshchikov was killed in action last August.
Though members of NATO’s “F-16 coalition” promised dozens of planes to Kiev, reportedly only six have been delivered so far. A Russian company has offered a reward of 15 million rubles ($170,000) to whomever shoots down the first F-16 in combat. No one has stepped forward to claim the reward so far.
Moscow has said that the American-made jets won’t make a difference on the battlefield and will be destroyed just like the other Western hardware provided to Kiev since the start of the conflict.