OT: Putin's War in Ukraine

[Vespers War]

I was reading a bit on the MiG-29, particularly impressions from NATO pilots when they got to fly East German examples after reunification, and the consensus seems to be "great knife-fighter, but good luck surviving to get there." In any of its Soviet-era configurations, it's a very head-down aircraft due to a lack of automation and the need to manually configure switches and knobs, and it's intended to be guided to a target by ground control. Its radar only has something like a 43 mile range.

Both the Slovakian and Polish Fulcrums should be more pilot-friendly, since they received upgrades with NATO-compliant electronics that more heads-up. Slovakia has 9 upgraded single-seat aircraft and 2 twin-seat (originally they had 10 single-seat, but one crashed during a training exercise). Some are apparently in fairly rough shape, and IIRC only 4 were still active immediately before they were retired last year. I believe Poland upgraded 16 aircraft. Neither received any sort of Western weapons integration as far as I know, so they're still going to need Aphid, Adder, or Archer missiles for air-to-air combat, and Slovakia was out of those by the time they retired their aircraft.

Ukraine does have some upgraded MiG-29, the MiG-29MU1 and MiG-29MU2. The MU1 has electronics upgrades, extending the radar range to ~60 miles, adding GPS to the navigation, and using a NATO-standard radio, while the single MU2 also integrates precision air-to-ground weapons (a bit questionable IMO since the Fulcrum has a pretty pathetic payload of 4 tonnes, slightly more than half an F-16's payload). I don't know how many were upgraded to MU1 standard, and there's just the lone MU2 (which has been serving in an air defense role because they need that more than a bomb truck).

Slovakia's also sending half a battery of Kub/Gainful SAM launchers out of the four batteries that they had retained for training purposes, along with 200 missiles for the launchers.