Slovakia’s president criticized the decision to transfer MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine

Transferring MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine without an adequate replacement weakened Slovakia’s defense capability.

This was stated by Slovak President Peter Pellegrini on his Facebook page.

“To this day I consider it a mistake that Slovakia got rid of the MiGs while at that time having no replacement. No other country acted in such a way that, after transferring its own equipment, it had to rely exclusively on help from its neighbors,” he wrote.

Pellegrini questioned the previous leadership’s claims that the aircraft were supposedly unfit for service, stressing that in that case they would not have been able to fly to Ukraine.

According to the president, when he was head of government he personally flew on MiG-29s, and at that time the fighters were in working order and capable of carrying out combat tasks.

On November 11, 2025, the outlet Aktuality wrote that Slovakia’s prosecutor’s office had ended its investigation into the legality of the MiG-29 transfer to Ukraine, finding no evidence of a crime in the previous authorities’ decisions. According to media reports, prosecutors could not prove that Slovakia suffered damage as a result of aiding Kyiv.

In June 2024, Slovak Defense Ministry State Secretary Igor Melicher stated that Slovakia’s transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in 2023 had been deemed illegal. According to him, the expert analysis that former Defense Minister Jaroslav Naď used to justify the transfer “clearly does not exist.”