The shift, when it came, was blunt: on 30 August 2024, presidential decree No. 600 removed Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk as commander of Ukraine’s Air Force. The trend underneath his three wartime years is worth retracing, because his arc tracks the air force’s own: survival, adaptation, Western integration, and an ending nobody scripted.
Oleshchuk was a career aviator who came up through the underfunded 1990s and 2000s, taking command before Russia’s full-scale invasion. His first test came on 24 February 2022, when Russian missiles struck Ukrainian bases hoping to erase the air force on the ground; warned through intelligence channels, his pilots had dispersed aircraft to secondary airfields, and the force survived to fight for Kyiv. He then managed a Soviet legacy fleet, MiG-29s, Su-27s, Su-24s and Su-25s, as irreplaceable inventory, stretching it by overseeing the technical work that put Western Storm Shadow cruise missiles onto Su-24 airframes.
What changed under his command was integration: Patriot, IRIS-T, NASAMS and Gepard systems woven together with Soviet-era S-300, S-125 and Buk batteries into one air-defense architecture, backed by an international coalition his command lobbied for specific capabilities, from ballistic defense to Shahed interception. Mobile units optimized for drone waves became an institution, not an improvisation.
Then the F-16 era began: pilot training from 2023 with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, maintenance lines built inside a war zone, and the first aircraft delivered in summer 2024. On 26 August, during a major Russian attack, one of the new jets went down. The death of top pilot Oleksii Mes was confirmed days later, and lawmaker Mariana Bezuhla claimed the aircraft fell to a Patriot battery through poor coordination between units. Oleshchuk answered that “This does not matter to the people who chose Mariana Bezuhla as a tool to discredit the top military leadership”, adding “It will not be possible to pin everything on the army”.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy framed the removal as renewal: “I decided to replace the Commander of the Air Force”, thanking pilots, engineers and air-defense crews, saying “we must strengthen ourselves. And protect people. Protect the personnel.” Oleshchuk’s own exit line, posted near midnight and attributed to Valerii Zaluzhnyi, was quieter: “However difficult it may be for us, we will certainly not be ashamed”. Watch this space: the architecture he built still guards the skies. The architect guards none of it.
Sources
- Mykola Oleshchuk: Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force | Ukraine War Analytics
- Former Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk comments on his dismissal with Zaluzhnyi's phrase | RBC-Ukraine
