The North Atlantic Alliance and Ukraine are deepening cooperation in the field of science and technology and launching a high-level Ukraine-NATO Innovation Dialogue. This was announced by the Alliance and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
“This is still a war of tanks, trenches and artillery. But at the same time we see mass use of drones, artificial intelligence to automatically translate intercepted communications, the importance of a privately developed system like StarLink that provides communication where there was none. We saw the role of companies such as Microsoft in transferring the data of Ukrainian ministries to the cloud (…). Therefore, it is also a war of innovations,” David van Wiel, NATO Assistant Secretary General for New Security Challenges, explained the importance of the initiative to journalists in Brussels.
As part of the partnership, NATO is ready to provide experts to evaluate Ukrainian technologies proposed for implementation at the front, Van Wiel said.
“You can imagine that there are hundreds of ideas coming in. Then the question arises, how to quickly separate the useful from the less useful? But we have a group of scientists associated with our Science for Peace and Security program that can actually help with that. So this is one specific part of the assistance we can provide,” the NATO official explained.
The second track in this direction, which will be worked out, is the sources of financing innovative initiatives.
“A lot of private money is now being attracted and collected to finance these initiatives. There is also government grant funding for these companies in the early stages (…). So at all these different stages, we will look at the needs, and then we will see how, through the unification of allies or through the Alliance itself, we can help financially,” van Wiel summarized.
The directions that will be worked on as a matter of priority are directly related to the current challenges facing Ukraine, explained the high-ranking official of the Alliance. Will work on detection of Iranian dronesstability of Ukrainian energy networks and digital partnership.
“We want to contribute to better detection of Iranian drones that are currently being used in Ukraine (…). We take a detailed look at what a drone looks like, how it flies, how it works, how we can determine what systems can best detect it and in what form. Research work takes some time – it’s not something you’ll see tomorrow. But in the medium term, it can create systems that will provide better protection against these drones than the existing systems,” the NATO official explained.
On May 24, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukrainian military shot down almost 900 Iranian Shahed drones out of 1160 used by Russian troops against Ukrainian towns and villages. According to him, Ukraine is “constantly looking for tools to make the number of downed Iranian drones complete.”