As Ukraine Mourns a Pilot’s Death, Jet’s Crash Is Still a Mystery

As hundreds of Russian missiles and drones streaked across Ukraine on Monday, the Ukrainian fighter pilot known as Moonfish was exactly where he had said he always wanted to be: in the cockpit of an F-16 giving chase.

“The F-16 is a Swiss Army knife,” the pilot, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, told reporters while training on the warplane last fall. “It’s a very good weapon that can carry out any mission.”

Colonel Mes helped lead Ukraine’s intense lobbying effort to secure the F-16 fighter jets, a half-dozen of which joined the fight against Russia earlier this month. And he was among the dozen or so pilots trained to fly the sophisticated warplane in combat.

After shooting down three Russian cruise missiles and one attack drone in Monday’s assault, he was racing to intercept yet another target when ground control lost communication with his aircraft, Ukrainian Air Force officials said.

“The plane crashed, the pilot died,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.

The death of a widely celebrated pilot and the loss of one of the long-coveted fighter jets so soon after their deployment cast a pall over the battlefield just as the giddy first days of the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region were fading away and concerns mounted over an advancing Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.

As the nation mourned the death of the pilot, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine dismissed the head of the country’s Air Force and promised a thorough investigation of the incident, including the possibility raised by a Western official on Friday that it was the result of friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery.