Current legislation gives advantages to the state sector of the defence industry, and the Ministry of Defence plans to reduce this gap. This was stated by Deputy Defence Minister for the defence-industrial complex Hanna Gvozdiar during a discussion at the LB.Talks platform on the topic “What to fight with tomorrow. How Ukraine can win the technological race”.
“If four years ago this was fair, because the entire core of the defence industry was concentrated in state enterprises, today the market has grown significantly and we see fully equivalent players in private ownership,” the deputy minister said.
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According to Gvozdiar, for the armed forces it makes no difference who supplies weapons and equipment — a private or a state manufacturer — so both forms of ownership should be given the same opportunities. The changes are planned both through government resolutions and through an internal targeted programme of the Ministry of Defence.
She separately described how state support for the sector is currently structured: Brave1 grants for small manufacturers, then the “valley of death”, and then the scaling-up of enterprises in state ownership.
“This is, unfortunately, how this system is arranged today,” the deputy minister noted.
The ministry intends to change the state’s approach to spending money on weapons development. To do this, Gvozdiar said they plan to establish interaction with the military: to hear their plan for what they are going to fight with and how they envision their armaments, and then, under transparent rules, invest funds in those developments that the state sees as part of security in the future.
In brief, what was discussed during LB.Talks – watch “What to fight with tomorrow”: a report from the LB.Talks discussion on how Ukraine can win the technological race
We will publish an extended version of the discussion soon.