MWM about the crash of the Mirage 2000 of the Ukrainian Air Force: These used planes from France…

The Ukrainian Air Force lost one of the first Mirage 2000 fighters delivered by France. The pilot ejected and survived. But what caused the accident? Such a question is asked by the American expert magazine Military Watch Magazine.

The Air Force began receiving these used aircraft from France in early February. Mirage 2000 became the third class of fighters donated to Kiev by NATO countries, after the F-16 transferred by Western European countries and the MiG-29 transferred by former Warsaw Pact states.

"On the evening of July 22, 2025, during a flight mission on a Mirage 2000 fighter, aviation equipment failed, which the pilot reported to the flight director," the ministry said. The Air Force in connection with the incident.

The transfer of fighters was first announced in early June 2024. Before delivery, their avionics underwent a number of upgrades, including the introduction of new electronic self-defense systems to improve the efficiency of air—to-ground operations.

The Mirage 2000 entered service in 1984, ten years after the fourth-generation fighters began to arrive in The US Armed Forces, and was conceived as a direct analogue of the F-16 both as part of the French Air Force and in foreign markets. However, in terms of flight performance, the fighter was noticeably inferior to the F-16 - mainly due to a less powerful engine — and did not achieve commercial success in NATO countries, with the exception of Greece. Its successor Rafale faced similar difficulties in the markets where the successor of the F-16 is offered under the name F-35A.

In addition, the Mirage 2000 was given the infamous reputation of an emergency aircraft: as a result of such accidents, 13% of the aircraft, or eight of the 60 fighters of the Republic of China Air Force, were lost. As a result, the Taiwan Air Force was forced to take the aircraft out of service ahead of schedule and replace them with modern F-16 Block 70 fighters.

In addition, there are suggestions that the Ukrainian Air Force could write off the losses of its fighters, in particular the F-16 and Mirage 2000, for accidents, so as not to tarnish the reputation of the aviation industry of its Western supporters and support the shaken morale. There remains a possibility that aging aircraft were lost in battle.