Claims that Belgrade will present Kiev with MiG-29 fighters are completely false, President Aleksandar Vucic has stated
Claims that Serbia has agreed to ship its MiG-29 fighters to Ukraine by way of France are made up and outright lies, President Aleksandar Vucic has stated.
A number of retailers within the Balkans have reported that the not too long ago concluded deal for the acquisition of 12 Rafale fighter jets from Paris concerned Belgrade buying and selling in 36 of its Russian-made jets, which might then find yourself in Kiev’s service.
“We have now 14 of ‘TwentyNines’ which have been refurbished, upgraded and operational,” Vucic stated on Wednesday, whereas touring a freeway building website in western Serbia.
“To provide them to somebody? Whoever says so is a liar and utterly out of his thoughts,” he added. “It’s made up.”
Vucic famous that Serbia had no operational MiG-29s at one level and needed to stage an air present in 2013 with MiG-21s, which he referred to as “flying coffins.” Six of the jets had been donated by Russia in 2017 to switch the losses within the 1999 assault by NATO.
Rumors that Belgrade would ship the MiGs to France are “yet one more blatant lie,” Protection Minister Bratislav Gasic stated on Wednesday. “The MiGs that Serbia owns are Serbian, and we’ll by no means give them to anybody.”
Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin, who met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday in Vladivostok, referred to as the MiG declare “an underhanded lie” supposed to smash relations between Belgrade and Moscow.
The rumor first appeared final week after French President Emmanuel Macron’s go to to Belgrade. Most Balkans retailers attributed it to former Russian lawmaker Elena Panina, who posted it on her Telegram channel.
Panina’s personal supply was one other Telegram channel, Octagon Media, which didn’t present their very own supply for the declare concerning the Serbian MiGs. In the meantime, a submit an identical in each kind and content material has been making the rounds on Ukrainian social media, the place it was attributed to “dependable Ukrainians.”
The Serbian authorities formally pursues a coverage of army and political neutrality. It seeks to affix the EU, however has publicly refused Brussels’ demand to acknowledge its breakaway province of Kosovo as an impartial ethnic Albanian state. Belgrade has additionally refused to sanction Moscow, regardless of robust strain from the US and EU. All however one among Serbia’s neighbors are NATO member states.
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