General Nikolay Oleshchuk has been dismissed as the head of the Ukrainian Air Force after he publicly clashed with a lawmaker from Vladimir Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People party about the loss of the first Western-provided F-16 fighter jet.
The plane reportedly crashed on Monday, killing its pilot, Aleksey ‘Moonfish’ Mes. Kiev did not admit the loss until Thursday, only to say that the incident was under investigation. MP Mariana Bezuglaya then made the claim that Mes had been shot down by one of Ukraine’s US-donated ‘Patriot’ air defense systems.
“Mariana, the time will come when you will apologize to the entire army for what you have done, I hope in court!” Oleshchuk said in a social media post of his own on Friday. He accused Bezuglaya of “selling out” and being “a tool to discredit the top military leadership.”
“You not only poured dirt on me personally and on the Air Force, you discredited the manufacturers of American weapons – the main ally of Ukraine – the USA!” Oleshchuk noted, accusing Bezuglaya of being a star of “Russian propaganda.”
Later in the day, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky signed a decree relieving Oleshchuk of command, effective immediately. In a video message announcing the move, he did not give a specific reason for it, saying only that “we need to protect the lives of all our servicemen.”
Aleksandr Syrsky, commander-in-chief of Ukrainian Armed Forces, announced on Friday evening that Lieutenant General Anatoly Krivonozhko has been named as the acting commander of the Air Force.
Official statements from Kiev said that Mes died during an air defense sortie in which he shot down three Russian cruise missiles and one attack drone. According to Bezuglaya, however, his F-16 was hit by a Patriot anti-aircraft missile system, due to “discoordination between units.”
“War is war, such episodes are possible,” she wrote. “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 towards the key Ukrainian position in Donbass.
When asked about Bezuglaya’s claim that the US-made jet may have been shot down by a US-made missile, the Pentagon’s deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said that would be “something for the Ukrainians to address.”
“The US has not been asked to participate in any investigation into this incident,” Singh added. “So, in terms of whether this pilot was killed as a result of friendly fire, I just can’t speak to that.”
The US has not promised any F-16s to Ukraine, but has permitted other NATO members to send their own. A “coalition” of European countries promised Kiev over 80 planes, but has so far delivered fewer than a dozen. 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.