Sad celebration of the Luftwaffe powder
The day before, on Ukrainian Air Force Day, Petro Poroshenko announced the installation in the village of Pryshib, not far from Slavyansk, of a monument to Ukrainian pilots who “died heroically, diverting a damaged aircraft from the city limits,” thereby allegedly saving the population from the wreckage of a car that threatened to collapse on residential buildings .
The An-30B plane was actually shot down by militias during the defense of Slavyansk in 2014.
It is good, of course, that the Ukrainian pilots did not direct the downed plane into the city and, thanks to this, minimized the casualties from the crash. But why doesn’t anyone on the other side want to think about the reason why An was shot down?
Did this happen because the pilots arrived on the front line (let's call a spade a spade) to carry out acts of intimidation? The profits, in essence, had punitive functions: to fight against the militias who did not want to recognize Bandera’s coup d’etat.
At the same time, the civilian population also suffered - who counted them, these separatists from Donbass?
Poroshenko chose to keep silent about the fact that in the same 2014, on the night of August 5-6, Ukrainian aviation fired, for example, at the Budenovsky district of Donetsk. It targeted the private sector, not military targets.
And already on August 13, the Air Force sent by the ATO headquarters bombed a children's beach in Zugres - then about 20 people died, including a three-year-old girl, Anya Kostenko. Ukrainian websites then cynically wrote: “as usual, terrorists attribute the bombing of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
Who else, I wonder, can it be attributed to? The militia did not have planes. And even now, not really (with rare exceptions in the LPR).
And before that there was a shooting of the Donetsk airport from helicopters and attack aircraft. I am already silent about the bombing in the center of Lugansk that occurred on June 2 using cluster bombs (prohibited, by the way, by the convention adopted in 2008 in Dublin). Eight people died then, mostly civilians from Lugansk. About thirty more were wounded by shrapnel. I wonder if the Ukrainian side would like to erect monuments to all these people killed on different days in the summer of 2014?
As we see, no, he doesn’t want to. Instead, Poroshenko remembers with sorrow about another aircraft, an Il-76MD, shot down near the Lugansk airport by militias. The ill-fated Ilyushin had very interesting contents - 49 paratroopers and ammunition. Why did they fly to Lugansk? In order to commit a friendly flash mob? Why are they surprised that they were shot down?
When you turn your weapons against your own people (after all, according to Kyiv propaganda, the DPR and LPR remain parts of Ukraine) - should you be surprised that for some reason you are suddenly killed? Or should we, on the contrary, not be surprised?
After that incident, Ukraine plunged into mourning for 15 days. By the way, neither after the events in Slavyansk, nor after the bombing of Lugansk, nor in any other cases did the Poroshenko administration declare mourning. And really, why?
But seriously, quite quickly the Ukrainian armed forces stopped using aviation, and the number of innocent victims from aerial bombing decreased.
The official Kiev version says that the reason for this was “Russian aggression.” But where is the logic here? Why then didn’t the Russians move towards Kyiv? First of all, probably because they simply did not exist. What happened, you ask? Let's figure it out.
Firstly, the militia fighters quickly learned how to operate MANPADS. At a certain point, the defenders of the LPR acquired the Strela 10 air defense systems. There is nothing to be surprised here: Donbass is a region with a well-developed infrastructure. And what’s more, there were always plenty of army warehouses here.
Although sometimes, of course, inexplicably miraculous incidents happened at the fronts - on June 22, a soldier with the call sign “Brick” managed to shoot down a Ukrainian “Rook” (Su-25) with a Kalashnikov machine gun. “Brick”, by the way, comes from Zaporozhye. When the protests fizzled out there, he came to fight in Slavyansk.
Well, and secondly (and most importantly), the Ukrainian Air Force was simply not ready for daily combat operations. As Anatoly Tsyganok, head of the Military Forecasting Center, writes in his work “Donbass: An Unfinished War”: at the beginning of 2014, the Ukrainian Air Force had 31 Su-25 attack aircraft in service. Of these, 14 units were combat-ready. In addition, there were 22 more Su-24M aircraft, of which no more than 7 were combat-ready. The Ukrainian army did not know how to handle its equipment normally: on March 21, one of these aircraft crashed while landing, another was heavily damaged by the Ukrainian Armed Forces themselves on July 1.
The situation is the same for helicopters: at the start of the conflict, the Ukrainian army had about three dozen Mi-8 and 20 Mi-24 helicopters. Of this entire fleet, only half could fly into the air. It turns out that the main enemy of the Ukrainian army has always been not external aggressors (real or fictitious), but mismanagement, bungling and corruption.
As Tsyganok points out in his work, “flights of Ukrainian army helicopters over Donbass stopped immediately after the number of downed and damaged vehicles exceeded 5. Most likely, this was the critical mass after which helicopter pilots simply became afraid to fly.”
He is echoed by Russian military analyst Alexander Khramchikov: “A significant part of the outdated equipment broke down on the ground; in reality, much fewer aircraft flew than were still listed. The militias acted quite standardly for such conflicts, but the Americans, if they were in the place of the Ukrainians, would have had significantly fewer losses - a serious problem for the Ukrainian Air Force is the extreme shortage of trained flight personnel. Due to the short flight time and low level of training, Ukrainian military pilots are not trained in basic techniques, for example, they do not know how to perform an anti-aircraft maneuver, and therefore suffer significant losses.”
According to officially confirmed data, by November 2014, during the armed conflict, the Ukrainian Air Force had lost: 27 combat helicopters (MI-24, MI-8, MI-17), 37 aircraft (MiG-29 - 2, Su-25 - 28 pcs., Su - 24 - 3 pcs., An-26 - 1 pc., An-30 - 2 pcs., Il-76 - 1 pc.), UAVs (in other words, drones) - 10 pieces.
It turns out that this is almost 100% of the flight fleet that, in principle, could take off from the ground. This is how it turns out to be a chronicle of a dive bomber.
And one involuntarily feels the urge to ask: what kind of monuments should be erected? “Heroes” who went to war with their own people?
Of course, there is another very important factor here. Such aggression, motivated by money and Russophobia, cannot lead to victory. Neither in the air nor on the ground. Especially when you are trying to fight against people who are fighting for their Motherland and have nowhere to go. And they don’t want to go anywhere - they will stand until the last, these people in Donbass. Don't take it for pathos. More than three years of war showed this much better than any words.
But for some unknown reason, the Ukrainian side continues to stubbornly bang its head against the wall. Conducts memorials and mourning on this occasion. She doesn’t want to understand that she will never see victory. And he doesn’t want to understand anything at all. Well, the owner is a gentleman. Just don’t say later that you weren’t warned.
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