Finland and Ukraine have signed a new defence cooperation agreement that creates a framework for joint production, technology transfers and industrial projects, including the development and manufacture of drones in Finland.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the agreement on 23 September in New York during the high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly. The deal, negotiated over the summer and early autumn under the leadership of Finland’s Ministry of Defence, is intended to deepen cooperation between the two countries’ defence industries while strengthening their respective military capabilities.
The agreement does not itself provide funding for individual production projects. Instead, it establishes the framework under which Finnish and Ukrainian companies can pursue joint manufacturing, research and development, and the transfer of technology, knowledge and expertise. It also seeks to make administrative procedures, including export authorisations, more efficient when defence equipment and technology are transferred between the two countries.
Drones are at the centre of the new cooperation, but the partnership is broader than unmanned aircraft. Earlier agreements between Finnish and Ukrainian companies have covered unmanned ground vehicles and maritime systems, while the wider defence relationship includes cooperation across land, maritime and air capabilities as well as technology and other areas. Three memorandums were signed during Stubb’s August visit to Kyiv, involving Finnish companies Patria, Insta and Boomeranger and Ukrainian partners.
During that August visit, Stubb said he expected around 90 per cent of drone production resulting from the planned cooperation to go to Ukraine, with about 10 per cent remaining in Finland. The figure was presented by Stubb as an expectation for the planned cooperation rather than as a fixed allocation established by the September agreement itself.
Patria has already announced plans to begin producing drones in Finland in cooperation with Ukrainian manufacturer Center of Unmanned Technologies, also known as General Cherry. The planned industrial relationship illustrates how the new agreement is intended to move cooperation beyond political commitments and towards production between companies in the two countries.
The August delegation to Kyiv also included representatives from Nokia, ICEYE, Sensofusion and NestAI, reflecting the wider technology dimension of the relationship. Finnish and Ukrainian officials have increasingly presented defence cooperation as a two-way process, with Ukraine bringing experience gained from modern warfare while Finland contributes industrial capacity, technology and expertise.
That exchange is an important part of Helsinki’s reasoning behind the agreement. Stubb has said that Finland can use lessons from Ukraine to strengthen its own defence capabilities, while the Finnish government has described the partnership as a way to prepare Finnish defence industry and armed forces for increasingly technology-driven warfare. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said the agreement would support both Ukraine’s defence and Finland’s defence industry.
Defence Minister Antti Hakkänen said the agreement creates opportunities for Finnish defence companies while supporting Ukraine’s defence capability. The practical implementation will be handled by Finland’s Ministry of Defence.
The agreement also fits into a broader Nordic and Baltic effort to expand defence industrial cooperation with Ukraine. In August, the Nordic and Baltic countries said they would deepen joint defence production with Ukrainian companies, including work involving drones, air defence, electronic warfare systems, ammunition and other defence technologies.
For Finland, the development comes as defence industry cooperation with Ukraine has become an increasingly established part of its support for Kyiv. In June, Finland and Ukraine signed a separate memorandum on quality assurance in defence industrial production, providing a framework for cooperation in that area. Finland has also continued supplying defence materiel to Ukraine, with the government announcing in September that its total defence materiel assistance had reached approximately EUR 3.6 billion.
The new drone agreement therefore represents a shift from cooperation based largely on supplying equipment towards a closer industrial relationship in which Finnish and Ukrainian companies can develop and manufacture defence systems together. The scale and speed of that production will depend on the individual projects companies establish under the new framework, but the agreement gives those projects a formal structure for moving forward.
For Ukraine, the arrangement offers another route to expand production capacity outside the country while maintaining access to Ukrainian defence expertise. For Finland, it provides an opportunity to incorporate lessons from a war in which drones, autonomous systems and rapidly changing battlefield technology have become increasingly important. The agreement places both objectives within the same industrial framework, making defence cooperation between the two countries more closely tied to production, technology and long-term capability development.
