Over the past day or two, lots of reports have been made about a single Ukrainian MiG-29 fighter pilot who has shot down five or six Russian fighters. It’s a great story with a couple problems that boil down to: “fog of war.” Adding to the problem of determining just what the frak is going on is the fact that while there is footage of some of these supposed aerial victories… they might well be computer generated simulations. Some of the combat simulators available to be played on standard home computer equipment produce footage so realistic that even at full resolution and on large screens they’re a little hard to see as fake; scale them down and blur them a bit and make them look like crappy cell phone footage, and the digital artifacts are largely gone.
*Could* there be a Ukrainian ace prowling the skies? Sure. It’s certainly a target rich environment. Look at World War II… the highest scoring aces were on the Axis side, because their skies were *filled* with Allied pilots with relatively low experience. But *is* there such a pilot? Who the frak knows. If the war ends in a week with Putin strung up in Red Square, a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine and a serious international tribunal that investigates every last bullet fired, we might still never know for sure. But if the Ghost serves as an enduring source of morale and pride for the Ukrainians… then the myth will never die.