At the date of the German attack, 17 Soviet Air Force regiments (IAPs) based near the Soviet borders had already received a total of 917 MiGs, plus 64 received by Baltic and Black Sea Naval Aviation; in spite of this, only pilots of few units (20th Mixed Air Division, 41st, 124th, 126th IAP of the Western Special Military District and the 23rd Kiev Air Regiment, 55 IAP on the Southern front) were able to fly well this aircraft. Probably, Stalin was conscious of the weakening of his armed forces, and made anything to gain time delaying the war; he ignored many informations preannouncing the German attack some months before. He thought they were false informations, maybe created by British or by German officers that wanted him to react with some provocations to force Hitler to really start a war against him.
The aircrafts based near the border were forthemost destroyed during the first attack of the Luftwaffe on the early morning of June 22, 1941, the first day of war. The 9th Mixed Aircraft Division had a total of 409 aircrafts, of which at least 233 were new MiGs; it lost 347 of its aircrafts on the first day of war, fortemost destroyed on the ground. On the morning of 22 June, Soviet Army air Force Commander General P. Zhigarev sent 99 new MiG-3s on the front, but the decision was wrong: Soviets had to evacuate rapidly many airfields, and often there was not the possibility to fly away all aircrafts, so many of them had to be abandoned or destroyed. On June 24, there was not a single new fighter in the west, but on 25 June more than 200 new aircrafts arrived, and new regiments arrived at the front daily. The Germans captured 22 MiGs in near-flyable condition and tried to sell them to Finland. Finns were aware of the problems of MiG-3s, so they refused to pay them, hoping to obtain them for free, but this didn't happened.

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