The military leaders of Nordic members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) said they are only interested in purchasing weapons that have undergone battlefield testing in Ukraine.
Speaking at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual meeting last week, “For new [supply] chains and new technologies, I’m never going to buy anything that hasn’t worked in Ukraine,” Maj. Gen. Peter Harling Boysen, chief of the Royal Danish Army, explained.
During the panel discussion on Northern Europe, Lt. Gen. Pasi Välimäki, Commander of the Finnish Army, said demonstrations are nice, but weapons that are tested in Ukraine are proven to work.
Since the Russian invasion in 2022, Western and Ukrainian leaders have touted the war as an opportunity for NATO weapon systems to be utilized in battle to test their effectiveness in combat against Russian forces.
In September, Alexus Grynkewich, a US Air Force general who serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, urged more weapons makers to test their military equipment in Ukraine.
Latvian Secretary of the National Security Council Aivars Puriņš said that throughout the war in Ukraine, Western states have discovered that weapons platforms are not functional in actual conflict.
“We have had too many stories, I think, over these years in Ukraine [where] the best technology solutions were deployed, and suddenly they didn’t work as they were kind of supposed to be and that’s the logic we should not be repeating,” he told Breaking Defense.
NATO has viewed the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to weaken Russia. Using Kiev as a proxy has come at a huge cost to Ukrainians. Moscow offered to end the war within a few months and allow Kiev to keep all of Ukraine except the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
However, President Zelensky’s Western backers urged him to reject the Russian proposal and offered to flood Kiev with billions in aid and arms.
Ukraine has lost at least hundreds of thousands of troops, millions of people have been displaced, and Russia is now demanding Kiev cede at least 20% of its territory.
