It works damn well for the money ... as an alarming number of hotshots discovered in VN. It also has an extremely high accident rate, but considering that thousands of them were flown by Third World dudes who were lucky to have had a check ride in an ox cart before strapping in, that's probably not the Russki's fault ... all that much.
Greetings from Croatia.
There was a lot of debate here about the fighter’s choice and a lot of of unverified report from red tape press.
Problem was in reality that our’s minister of defence initial plan to purchase modern (although second hand ) fighters had to be posponed by some years ‘cause economical crisis and more stringent military acquisition.
That left us with a capablity gap around year 2013, that was worstened by the loss of two jets last november during training .
Renting air coverage from other Nato countries, a solution that some of ours neightbours adopted was immediately refused for national dignity’s sake.
In meantime we received a lot of offers of short-time renting of very used aircraft as gap-filler: f-16, mirages and last one a ridicoulous (apparently) free-of- charge F-4F offer from Germany.
Also this proposed solution misses completely the point however.
It is about Time, stupid:
You can offer us also free of charge F-22s, we still would need about two years to train pilots and ground crews, let alone the need to build a dedicated line of support, but we need fighters NOW.
So, only possible choice will be to overhaul our mig-21f or the time being and wait until we can afford ourselves Gripens (as it is the only modern fighters than can be sobstitute Fishbeds in a quasi one -to-one basis, that is the sole real requisite ).