Ukraine is currently leading the race for defense innovations, and Germany is drawing on the Ukrainian experience to modernize its own armed forces.
Admiral Christian Bock, director of the Bundeswehr Innovation Center, said this in an interview with an Ukrinform correspondent on the sidelines of the New Age Defense conference in Berlin.
Asked who wins the race for defense innovations today – Germany (and Europe) or Russia – Admiral Bock responded without hesitation: “L’Ukraine”.
Comparing the capabilities of Europe and Russia, he added: “We are starting to take the advantage. Because we have industrial and financial resources. And we have a partner like Ukraine, which provides us with all the information necessary to optimize our budgets and our industrial capacities. It is thanks to this that we are able to win.”
According to the admiral, one of the main lessons of the war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine was the need for constant technological adaptation to new threats and the creation of a flexible system capable of instantly integrating new experiences.
According to Mr. Bock, hardware and software evolve at different rates. As the software evolves much more quickly, the main task of the Bundeswehr in peacetime is to model the processes that the Ukrainians implement daily on the battlefield: the combination of different elements and their parallel development at distinct rhythms.
In this context, the director of the Bundeswehr Innovation Center particularly emphasized Ukraine’s ability to quickly adapt to war conditions.
As Bock points out, the involvement of the whole of society is a key factor in Ukrainian resilience. “It is not only the military who must face the threats; the whole of society must be involved. In addition, robots and unmanned systems allow the weakest to have a better chance of winning. a insisté l’admiral.
Commenting on Ukraine’s Delta situational awareness system, the Bundeswehr representative called it a perfect example of rapid digital adaptation.
He added that the Bundeswehr is already working on a system to combine data from different unmanned platforms into a single digital representation of the battlefield: “We are developing algorithms that will integrate all unmanned systems into a single situational awareness system.”
The admiral also emphasized that the future German anti-drone system will be developed taking into account the Ukrainian experience of multi-layer defense.
/2026/06/11/6a2a4ee24803c565853794.jpg "REPORTING. “On the front, the sky is literally teeming with drones”: how the Ukrainian army trains to face the threat")
