by DAVID AXE
The Ukrainian air force’s ex-French Dassault Mirage 2000 fighters are on the attack again. Too bad there are maybe five of the supersonic jets in Ukrainian service.
On or just before Thursday, a Mirage 2000 reportedly lobbed Hammer glide bombs at a Russian base in the urban ruins somewhere along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 56-month wider war on Ukraine.
For an entire year after the first 1980s-vintage Mirage 2000 arrived in Ukraine in February 2025, the Mirages strictly flew air defense sorties with their infrared-guided Magic 2 missiles, newer MICA missiles and their internal 30-millimeter cannons.
The top targets: high-speed Russian drones and cruise missiles.
In February 2026, that changed. That’s when a video depicted a Ukrainian Mirage lobbing a pair of the French-made Hammers in combat, reportedly for the first.
It was an early indication that the Ukrainians were finally beginning to shift more aerial assets to strikes on Russian ammo and fuel depots and troop concentrations as air-to-air drones, ground-based guns and surface-to-air missiles took over air defense.
The shift had precedent. For months after the first ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters arrived in Ukraine in August 2024, the American-designed fighters also stuck to defensive air patrols.
It wasn’t until the Ukrainian F-16 fleet had grown to a few dozen copies, out of 90 or so the Europeans have pledged, that some of the F-16s began flying bombing raids with American-made precision glide bombs.
