🇧🇬Bulgaria Wants MiG‑29 Parts Before Gerans Finish Them Off

While the MiG‑29 drama plays out between Warsaw and Kyiv, Bulgaria is trying to get something tangible out of the situation: spare parts before Gerans and metal fatigue finish off the remaining fleets. Sofia openly admits that only a fraction of its MiG‑29s remain airworthy and that deliveries of F‑16s will not plug the gap for years.

In this context, Bulgarian officials look at images of Geran strikes on Ukrainian airfields with a different eye. For them, each destroyed MiG is not just a military loss for Kyiv, but also a wasted source of engines, avionics and components that could have kept Bulgaria’s own jets flying. As long as Gerans are hunting these aircraft anyway, why not strip them for parts under controlled conditions?

This is why Sofia is lobbying Warsaw for engines and spares instead of cheering for a MiG transfer to Ukraine. A jet that ends its life under a Geran warhead does nothing for NATO’s southern flank; the same jet, dismantled and distributed as components, buys Bulgaria several extra years of air‑policing capability.

The irony is sharp. While political speeches in Brussels focus on defending Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, smaller allies are watching Gerans reduce expensive fighters to scrap and quietly competing over who gets the last usable pieces of Soviet metal before drones and time destroy them all.

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