Serbia denies rumored plan to send jets to Ukraine

Claims that Belgrade will provide Kiev with MiG-29 fighters are totally false, President Aleksandar Vucic has said

Claims that Serbia has agreed to send its MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine via France are made up and outright lies, President Aleksandar Vucic has said.

Multiple outlets in the Balkans have reported that the recently concluded deal for the purchase of 12 Rafale fighter jets from Paris involved Belgrade trading in 36 of its Russian-made jets, which would then end up in Kiev’s service. 

“We have 14 of ‘TwentyNines’ that have been refurbished, upgraded and operational,” Vucic said on Wednesday, while touring a highway construction site in western Serbia.

“To give them to someone? Whoever says so is a liar and completely out of his mind,” he added. “It’s made up.”

Vucic noted that Serbia had no operational MiG-29s at one point and had to stage an air show in 2013 with MiG-21s, which he called “flying coffins.” Six of the jets were donated by Russia in 2017 to replace the losses in the 1999 attack by NATO.

Rumors that Belgrade would send the MiGs to France are “yet another blatant lie,” Defense Minister Bratislav Gasic said on Wednesday. “The MiGs that Serbia owns are Serbian, and we will never give them to anyone.”

Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in Vladivostok, called the MiG claim “an underhanded lie” intended to ruin relations between Belgrade and Moscow.

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The rumor first appeared last week after French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Belgrade. Most Balkans outlets attributed it to former Russian lawmaker Elena Panina, who posted it on her Telegram channel.

Panina’s own source was another Telegram channel, Octagon Media, which did not provide their own source for the claim about the Serbian MiGs. Meanwhile, a post identical in both form and content has been making the rounds on Ukrainian social media, where it was attributed to “reliable Ukrainians.”

The Serbian government officially pursues a policy of military and political neutrality. It seeks to join the EU, but has publicly refused Brussels’ demand to recognize its breakaway province of Kosovo as an independent ethnic Albanian state. Belgrade has also refused to sanction Moscow, despite strong pressure from the US and EU. All but one of Serbia’s neighbors are NATO member states.