Defense, EU opens innovation office for industry startups in Kyiv

Brussels – The EU and Ukraine attempt defense integration to strengthen ties between the two sides and send a message to Moscow. The first EU-Ukraine Defense Industries Forum aims to chart the course of a new Europe, more integrated, with more Ukraine. That calls for a change of pace. “We have been calling for a year and a half now to increase the production of the European defense industry,” Kyiv’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said, speaking at the forum. “If we want to maintain peace in Europe, we have to switch to a war economy, paradoxical as it may be.”

Hence, the call for creating an interconnected industrial system through investment in Ukrainian enterprises. “Investing in our defense enterprises is a good way to help Ukraine,” Ukraine’s foreign minister continued. “Every euro invested in Ukraine generates a return in Europe’s security.” While the creation of this alliance “underscores that the country’s future lies in the European Union,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, Minister for Strategic Industries, noted. It is the political message for Putin, at the head of that “anti-European dictatorship in the east of Europe,” as Ukrainian government representatives call it, that “will not stop until there is a superior firepower.”

It is a message that seems to be getting through in Brussels, where the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, promised to Ukraine’s partners that “we will open a new EU Innovation Office in Kyiv by the end of the year to help match up Ukrainian start-ups and EU defense companies.” An announcement that adds to the long-term strategy for the defense of Ukraine, the EU is looking to with renewed momentum.

The forum also aims “to make Ukraine able to resist the invasion by increasing its industrial capacity, using what it already has, increasing it by financing and buying its production, Brorell stressed. Technology, on the one hand, and financial capabilities, on the other, must stand together to make Ukrainians able to have the military capabilities to resist.