New NATO-Ukraine Centre for War Analysis and Training to open in Poland next year

The new NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre (JATEC), being established in Poland to help the Alliance strategically apply battlefield lessons in the further course of the war provoked by Russia in 2022, is expected to be fully operational next year.

In an interview on the sidelines of the Washington summit on Thursday, a Polish Foreign Ministry spokesperson shared with DefenseScoop new details about this work-in-progress collaborative knowledge hub, the creation of which NATO leadership has clearly hinted at in recent months.

“First of all, this new center will be in Bydgoszcz. In Poland we call this place ‘NATO City’ because there is a large airfield and some NATO institutions there. So it will be a center for war analysis,” the spokesman explained.

The JATEC will be staffed primarily with military officers from across the Alliance and from Ukraine.

“It is a NATO center, but I think it will work in two directions. First, we have Ukrainians who have to adapt to NATO standards and use NATO weapons. But on the other hand, I think NATO countries can use all the Ukrainian knowledge from the three years of war, especially about Russian tactics, Russian weapons, Russian digital technology and so on,” the spokesman told DefenseScoop. “And that’s why I think the idea of ​​this institution is fruitful and very useful – not only for Ukrainians, but also for NATO.”

Since Ukraine first began fighting the Russian invasion, military forces around the world have been gathering survival experience and best practices to improve their performance on the modern battlefield.

In the interview, the Polish speaker also discussed specific areas of study that could be prioritized within the framework of JATEC.

“I think it’s all about tactics, technology and command and control systems. They’re different. And some work, but some don’t work,” the senior official said. “It’s a technological war — if you look at tanks, for example, that have tried to protect themselves from drones and you look at tank tactics. They’ve changed rapidly.”

Ukraine and Poland have an intertwined, complicated history, but today the armed forces of the two countries are considered close partners. They are also part of the Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade, which is a long-standing trilateral agreement between the three countries that make up the Lublin Triangle.

“We have been working with Ukraine for many, many years. But in 2022 – in the first months of the war – many of the soldiers who were trained in Lublin and worked with Polish forces were high-ranking members of the Ukrainian army,” the spokesman said.

In the long term, the new center could potentially become an important mechanism for training Ukrainian civilians to fight in volunteer armed forces.

“We have about two million Ukrainians in Poland – refugees – and some of them want to fight,” said the Polish government spokesman.

Most notably, in the new Washington summit declaration on Thursday, among other promises, the allies formalized the creation of JATEC, describing the new facility as “an important pillar of practical cooperation to learn and apply lessons from Russia’s war against Ukraine and increase Ukraine’s interoperability with NATO.”

And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also expressly pointed out during a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday that the new analysis and training center is an important element of the alliance’s overarching initiative to support the war-torn country.

“We think of real, strong steps by very strong people. But when you talk about the war, sometimes you can’t even use the word ‘success’. Success is your work and your well-being in life. Success is when you don’t lose your family, and success is when you survive. Winning this war would be a real success for us,” Zelensky told reporters at the press conference.

At the summit, the allies also committed to pursuing an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership.