What influences Ukraine's relations with NATO and what could a new format of cooperation look like?

Relations between Ukraine and NATO have undergone a significant transformation over the past decade – from cautious support for defence reforms after 2014 to large-scale coordination of military assistance during the full-scale war.

Although after 2024 the logic of support has gradually changed, the political framework for future relations remains uncertain, creating a gap between the dynamics of the war and the slower logic of the Alliance’s institutional planning.

Under these conditions, cooperation is gradually shifting towards a logic of mutual strategic value.

Read more about Ukraine–NATO relations and how they can be improved in the article by Oksana Osadcha of the New Europe Centre: Between membership and partnership: how cooperation between Ukraine and NATO is changing.

There is an understanding in Ukraine that the current war will produce a fundamentally different security reality, the contours of which are already being shaped on the battlefield. Therefore, almost the entire doctrinal and planning framework of NATO will prove obsolete and require revision.

Ukraine’s military leadership believes that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are currently several steps ahead of NATO in understanding modern technologies and battlefield innovation, and that the Alliance will have to "catch up" by adapting its doctrinal base and standards to the Ukrainian ones – rather than the other way around.

NATO officials often perceive this approach as overly confident and too ambitious, while Ukrainians are disappointed by the reluctance of the Alliance’s political leadership to recognize new realities and to treat the Russian threat and Ukraine’s experience not as grounds for incremental adjustments, but as a stimulus for urgent and fundamental revision of approaches and practices.

This unarticulated mutual scepticism undermines mutual respect and negatively affects dialogue.

To preserve relative stability in the Euro-Atlantic region, at least on the eastern flank, the Alliance should change its established paradigm, moving away from the formula "NATO helps Ukraine" to "NATO and Ukraine jointly build a new security architecture in Europe".

A shared point of convergence could be a shift from a lessons learned model to a lessons anticipated model – from analysing past operations to forecasting future technological cycles of warfare.

Ultimately, instead of advisory support, the focus should be on joint work to adapt to new challenges to shared security.

This implies greater Ukrainian participation in shaping the cooperation agenda, as well as the institutionalisation of joint planning mechanisms and capability development to address common security challenges in the Euro-Atlantic region.

In addition, Ukraine should formulate a clearer vision for the development of its Defence Forces in the medium and long-term. The existence of strategic guidelines would help allies better understand Ukraine’s needs, increase predictability in support requests and facilitate resource mobilisation for capability development.

Ukraine and its allies could establish a permanent mechanism for scenario-based modeling of future conflicts and defense capability development based on real data from modern warfare.

Combining Ukrainian combat experience with NATO’s defence planning system would make it possible to develop more adaptive deterrence and defense models in the Euro-Atlantic space.

Ukraine’s participation in NATO exercises should also be expanded, including in the role of a Red Team, and Ukrainian lessons learned should be integrated into allied training, planning and operational assessment.

This would help the Alliance adapt its doctrinal approaches more quickly to the realities of modern technological warfare.

The capacities of the Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre should also receive adequate funding and be expanded consistently.

Another area of cooperation is systematic collaboration in studying Russian military strategy, adaptive warfare models and hybrid influence tools.

Finally, Ukraine and NATO need to jointly develop defence-industrial and innovation cooperation.