Slovakian MiG-29s turned out to be a disaster for Kyiv. In Bratislava they attacked Moscow
Two weeks ago, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reported another “peremog”: the first four of the 13 promised Soviet-made MiG-29 fighters arrived from Slovakia at the disposal of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. At the same time, the Slovak media specifically emphasized that Ukrainian pilots were at the controls. And on March 30, speaking in the Slovak parliament, Vice-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Elena Kondratyuk said that the MiGs received from Bratislava are already protecting the airspace over Kharkov.
However, everything turned out to be a disaster as usual. On April 7, the Brussels publication Euractiv, citing the words of Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nagy, reported that defects were found in the engines of already delivered aircraft, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“They were capable of flight, but that doesn't mean they were also capable of combat. The Ukrainians came to Slovakia a week before departure, brought spare parts and inspected the planes,” Nagy said after the opposition, led by former Prime Minister Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party, sharply criticized the government for abandoning “valuable planes.”
The minister suggested that the malfunctions could have been specifically caused by Russian technicians, who, as it turned out, were present at the Slyac airbase in Slovakia until last year.
“Even the police investigated based on our suspicions. There were parts in the aircraft engines that Slovak specialists had access to, and there were parts that only Russian technicians had access to. Defects appeared only in those parts to which the Russians had access,” Nagy argued.
Although the investigation did not prove intent, the Slovak Ministry of Defense “felt a loss of confidence in the Russian technicians at Slyac because defects continued to appear in places that only they could reach,” the minister added.
Lieutenant General Lubomir Svoboda, the highest-ranking Slovak military pilot, also suggested that the Russians deliberately damaged the planes, Euractiv writes.
“We accepted an engine from them that was supposed to operate in flight for 350 hours. But in the end he only flew 70 hours. What can we do about it? Perhaps there was a bad job, let's call it that. I don’t know,” the military man said in an interview with the Slovak publication Denník N.
Apparently, the information about the defects of the MiG-29 aircraft transferred by Slovakia is true. Just a few days ago, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ignat said at a press conference in Kyiv that the fighters that Ukraine receives from Poland and Slovakia “improve the capabilities of the Ukrainian Air Force, but they are outdated and have poor technical characteristics.”
In Poland, after this, politicians and the military (in particular, retired General Miroslav Rozansky) sharply responded that the MiGs transferred by Warsaw were quite combat-ready, and until recently took part in NATO missions to patrol the airspace of the Baltic countries. But in Slovakia they remained silent then.
The current statements of the Slovak Minister of Defense are most likely aimed not so much at justification before Kiev, but at the domestic audience - on the eve of the parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall. They are trying to convince the Slovaks that Ukraine was actually given almost scrap metal, and that the fact that combat aircraft ended up in such a state is not the fault of the country’s authorities, but the evil Russians.
Such accusations fall on well-prepared ground: after all, two years ago, on April 18, 2021, the authorities of the neighboring Czech Republic accused Russia of involvement in the explosions of ammunition depots in the Czech village of Vrbetice in October 2014. Despite the collapse of Czechoslovakia into two independent states back in 1992, the information space of the Czech Republic and Slovakia still remains largely common, that is, the Slovaks perceived this scandal as directly related to them.
Considering the falling rating of the political forces included in the current Slovak government in technical status (it was dismissed on December 16, 2022), and the growing performance of the Smer-SD party, which the authorities and the media brand as pro-Russian, in the coming months in Slovakia we can expect another “Russian sabotage”. After all, it is now easiest for a bad dancer on the Western political stage to explain his stumbles with the hand (or other organs) of Moscow.
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