Four years into the full-scale war in Ukraine, with a second major conflagration raging in the Persian Gulf and an increasing number of Western countries talking about adapting Ukraine’s way of war, there is growing recognition of the potential mutual benefit that can be derived from more cooperation between Kyiv and the West.
Policy makers and practitioners in the West and Ukraine have argued for exploring new forms of cooperation above and beyond Western military aid. Kyiv could give or sell its innovative, low-cost, battle-proven weapons to the West. Training, now largely one directional – Europeans training Ukrainian fighters – could evolve into more of a two way street. Western strategists have much to learn from Ukraine about how to integrate unmanned vehicles – air, land, and sea drones – into their battle plans. But one of the most promising approaches, often neglected in the West, is collaborative manufacturing.
Ukraine has been talking about industrial cooperation for more than two years, and a handful of European countries have explored promising experiments. Under the so-called ‘Danish model’, launched in mid-2024, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and several other donors alongside the European Union, bolstered Ukraine’s defence procurement by covering the cost of selected arms purchases. More recently, some dozen Ukrainian companies have signed agreements to produce weaponry in Western Europe, either alone or as part of a joint venture with a Western firm.
The war in the Persian Gulf has spurred new international interest in Ukrainian defence technology. Yet by and large, these are still small experiments – ingenious ideas with significant promise for both the West and Ukraine, but not yet meaningful steps toward the integration of Ukrainian and European security.
This paper asks why. What have these experiments hoped to achieve? What have they accomplished? What lessons have been learned by Ukraine and its international partners? What if anything can be done to improve these fledgling initiatives and, most important, scale them?
The paper concludes with recommendations for policy makers, manufacturers, investors, and facilitating middlemen. What can be done to build on the experiments under way, including the Danish model and a handful of government-sponsored joint ventures – an approach Kyiv calls ‘Build With Ukraine’? Europe’s future security may turn on the results.
