Mundane regulatory problems in Kyiv and unimaginative institutional thinking in Europe’s militaries are holding up joint weapons production. And that is undermining Ukraine’s battlefield performance and leaving Europe’s armed forces unprepared for modern warfare. Those are the conclusions of a new report from the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London, and experts who spoke to Al Jazeera.
For two years, Kyiv has sought to scale up its weapons production by inviting Western partners to fund new production facilities in exchange for battlefield testing. Kyiv receives weapons, Western partners receive know-how. That formula has led to at least 180 business-to-business partnerships between Ukrainian and foreign partners, but 22 percent of them are stalled, according to the report, Beyond Aid: Making Ukraine Defence Cooperation Work.
One of those stalled ventures is an artillery shell factory that German defence giant Rheinmetall announced a year ago, which should now be starting production. Yet ground has not been broken on the project, because Ukrainian authorities have delayed permits and the government then moved the factory’s site. There are other legal and bureaucratic problems.
They can make hardware changes every three or four weeks.” That is a dizzying speed of innovation by the West’s peacetime standards. Who then owns the intellectual property in the improved product? Does the Ukrainian state have a stake at that point?” said Pool.
The problems sometimes lie in Europe’s rigid approach to land warfare, said Pool, who has spoken to Ukrainian teams looking for Western partners. In 2022, both Russia and Ukraine were fighting exclusively with classic battlefield artillery and heavy armour. Ukraine defeated Russia’s initial attacks with effective use of defensive weapons.
But when Ukraine went on the counteroffensive in 2023, it was unable to compete with Russian scale and production capacity, and quickly adapted. It designed cheap, long-range drones and missiles to stanch the flow of Russian weapons and fuel to the front, and to destroy Russian refining capacity. It also began to design and build its own first-person view (FPV) drones as a form of artillery.
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