Ukraine Loses Newly Received French Mirage 2000 Fighter to Crash

The Ukrainian Air Force has lost one of its first French-supplied Mirage 2000 fighters to a crash, with the pilot having ejected and survived. The service began to receive the aircraft second hand from France in early February, making it the third fighter class donated by NATO members alongside F-16s donated by countries across Europe, and MiG-29s donated by former Warsaw Pact states on the continent. “On the evening of July 22, 2025, while performing a flight mission on a Mirage-2000 fighter jet, an aircraft equipment failure occurred, which the pilot reported to the flight manager,” the Air Force reported regarding the incident. The transfer the fighters was first announced in early June 2024, with their avionics receiving a number of upgrades before delivery, including the integration of new electronic self-defence systems to facilitate more effective air-to-ground operations.

The Mirage 2000 entered service in the 1984, ten years after the U.S. Armed Forces had begun to operationalise their own fourth generation fighters, and was intended to provide a direct counterpart to the F-16 both in the French Air Force and on foreign markets. The fighter’s flight performance remained at a distinct disadvantage to that of the F-16, largely due to its reliance on a less powerful engine, andit failed to gain sales within NATO other than to Greece. This mirrors the similar struggles the fighter’s successor, the Rafale, has had competing in markets where the F-16’s own successor, the F-35A, has been offered.

The Mirage 2000 has become notorious for its proneness to crashing, with aircraft operated by the Republic of China Air Force seeing 13 percent of its fleet, or eight of 60 fighters, lost to such accidents. This has led the service to plan to phase the aircraft out of service early, and replace them with modern F-16 Block 70 fighters. It has nevertheless been speculated that the Ukrainian Air Force may have attributed the losses of its fighters to accidents, and in particular its F-16s and Mirage 2000s, to preserve the reputations of the aviation industries of its Western supporters and preserve morale. A possibility remains that the ageing jets may have been lost in combat.