After agreeing today on the Drone Deal with Ukraine, the European Union is exploring ways to apply the same model of cooperation between the defense industries to other military products, such as missiles and air defense capabilities.
That’s according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who spoke at a press conference during a visit to Kyiv on Wednesday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.
“We have just launched our Defense Industrial Partnership. That’s a big step and at its heart is a new Drone Deal,” she noted, explaining that the new cooperation will very concretely be built around new joint ventures with targeted tech transfers, expertise and investment in dual use sectors of Ukraine.
“The goal is to bring together the best of the Ukrainian and EU drone ecosystem,” she noted, adding that partnership will benefit from Ukraine’s ability to battle-test technology and EU’s capacity to build at speed and scale.
“We will not only build the next generation of drone and counterdrone systems together, but we will also manufacture them faster than ever before so that Ukraine gets what it needs now and Europe builds capabilities it might need for tomorrow,” von der Leyen noted.
