Russia has said that its forces shot down an F-16 fighter jet over Ukraine, prompting a brutal fact check.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday, the Russian Embassy in South Africa posted a photo of a destroyed F-16 fighter jet, which appeared to have the Ukrainian coat of arms on its tail. “When you ask Ukrainian pilots where their F-16s are,” the caption on the photo read, indicating that the Russians were taking credit for shooting down the jet.
The claim was swiftly discredited when X added a community note stating: “The photo shows a USAF F-16 that crashed in 2019.” The note also contained links to articles about the incident, which contained the same picture of the fighter jet that the Russian Embassy had used in its post. Newsweek has contacted Russia’s and Ukraine’s defense ministries for comment by email.
The photo showed an F-16 that crashed in May 2019 in California due to a failure in the aircraft’s hydraulics system, with 13 people left injured in the incident. In the original image, there was no Ukrainian coat of arms on the tail of the aircraft, suggesting the photo had been edited by the Russian Embassy.
“When your ammunition depots continue to explode and you have to publish photoshopped images of the F-16 to boost morale,” military analyst Oliver Alexander said on X in response to the post.
The day before the Russian Embassy in South Africa posted the photo to X, Russia launched strikes on Ukraine in the Khmelnytskyi region, after which pro-Kremlin media reported the destruction of five F-16s. However, there is still no official confirmation of the destruction of the aircraft.
Koen van Weel/AFP via Getty Images
The pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Military Observer” also reported that an American pilot was killed in the strikes in a now-deleted post. It cited a message posted on Facebook by the wife of the serviceman, which read: “Stephen died because of all this nonsense with the foreign instructor program. I don’t know why he agreed. And I don’t understand how they are going to bring my husband back from the damned Starokonstantinov.” This was later determined by independent media outlet The Insider to be fake.
In August, an American-made fourth-generation F-16 supplied to Ukraine crashed while repelling an aerial attack by Russia against the Ukrainians. It led to the death of a Ukrainian pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Oleksiy Mes, also known by his call sign “Moonfish,” according to the Kyiv military.
Mes had a high public profile after making frequent media appearances and visiting Washington, D.C., to lobby the U.S. into sending the aircraft, which Ukraine hoped would change the battlefield calculus.
Mes was among the Ukrainian pilots trained on the aircraft at the Skrydstrup base in Denmark. He said earlier this year that training had been “condensed” and flying the aircraft was more technically challenging.
Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to Washington, blamed the pilot’s death on inadequate training provided by the United States to Ukrainian F-16 pilots.
“U.S. instructors have failed to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets,” Antonov said in the Russian Embassy’s Telegram channel, as quoted in a report by TASS, a state-run Russian news agency.
“Local instructors have failed to train the Ukrainians,” Antonov added. “I can imagine how they would shout if reports came that the hapless plane was brought down by our soldiers.”
Mariana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian lawmaker, previously said the F-16 was mistakenly shot down by a U.S.-provided Patriot anti-aircraft missile system due to “discoordination between units”. She also accused air force high command of a “culture of lies.”
Following the pilot’s death, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed Mykola Oleshchuk, the head of Ukraine’s air force. The latter has dismissed Bezuhla’s concerns and accused her of discrediting Ukraine’s military leadership.
The Ukrainian Defense Forces said they do not believe pilot error was behind the incident, CNN reported, and an investigation into the crash is ongoing.
Ukraine received half-a-dozen F-16s at the start of August, the first tranche of a total of 45 that Kyiv’s allies have promised.