New Details on French Modifications to Mirage 2000 Fighters Heading to Ukraine: Early 2025 Deliveries Scheduled

<p >French government sources have provided further details on plans to delivery <a href=" target="_blank">Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft </a>to the Ukrainian Air Force, after plans to transfer the ageing combat jets were <a href=" target="_blank">first announced</a> in early June. French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu has announced that the second hand fighters will receive a number of upgrades before delivery, including the integration of new electronic self-defence systems that will facilitate more effective air to surface operations. These upgrades will be applied at Cazaux Air Base in southwest France. The Mirages’ avionics are currently configured for air to air operations, although with Ukraine’s existing and future planned fighters all being old Cold War era aircraft that lack the ability to go up against more modern Russian jets, they are deployed far from the frontlines to launch long range air to ground ordinance <a href=" target="_blank">against Russian targets</a>. With the Ukrainian Air Force having consistently avoided air to air engagements with Russian fighters, new fighters are expected to be deployed primarily for air to ground roles. France plans to transfer between 12 and 20 Mirage 2000s, which are set to all be delivered in the first quarter of 2025.</p><p ><img src=" title="Ukrainian Air Force F-16 "></p><p >Ukraine has received several dozen fighter aircraft from NATO members since the outbreak of full scale hostilities with Russian forces in early 2022, primarily Soviet MiG-29 fourth generation fighters which were widely exported across the Warsaw Pact in the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s. The first <a href=" target="_blank">U.S. built F-16s </a>were subsequently supplied in early August 2024, although the small number of these aircraft supplied <a href=" >quickly began </a>to take losses with <a href=" target="_blank">reports conflicting </a>on their cause. All three NATO fighter classes pledged to Ukraine are very early fourth generation designs being supplied second hand by countries that previously planned to retire them, with their ages requiring significantly greater maintenance than newly built fighters, while their obsolete avionics and missiles limits their potential in air to air combat. All three use old mechanically scanned array radars that are relatively straightforward to jam, while F-16s notably lack the Link 16 system needed to facilitate effective network centric operations. The Mirage 2000 will not introduce any fundamentally new capabilities not already provided by the F-16 or MiG-29, but will allow Ukraine to field more fighter squadrons as its fleet of Soviet built fourth generation aircraft is rapidly depleted. </p>