New NATO-Ukraine hub for war analysis, training to open in Poland next year

The new NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre (JATEC) being set up in Poland to help the alliance strategically apply lessons directly from the battlefield as the war provoked by Russia in 2022 wages on is expected to be fully operational in the next year.

In an interview on the sidelines of the Washington Summit on Thursday, a spokesperson for Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared new details with DefenseScoop about this in-the-works collaborative knowledge hub, which NATO leadership has been broadly hinting at launching in recent months.

“First of all, this new center will be in Bydgoszcz. In Poland, we call that place ‘NATO city’ because there is a big airfield and there are some NATO institutions there. And so this will be a center for analyzing war,” the spokesperson explained.

The JATEC is envisioned to be staffed primarily by military officers from across the alliance, as well as from Ukraine.

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

Since Ukraine first started combatting the Russian invasion, militaries across the globe have been tracking survival lessons and best practices to improve their capacity on the modern battlefield.

In the interview, the Polish spokesperson also spotlighted specific areas of study that may be prioritized within the JATEC.

“I think it’s mostly about tactics, technology, and command-and-control systems. They’re different. And some work, but some things do not work,” the senior official said. “It’s a technological war — when you look for example at tanks, which tried to protect themselves from drones, and look at the tank tactics. It’s changed rapidly.”

Ukraine and Poland share an intertwined, complicated history, but in the contemporary era the nations’ militaries are considered close partners. They’re also parts of the Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade, which marks a longstanding trilateral agreement between the three countries that make up the Lublin Triangle.

“We’ve cooperated with Ukraine for many, many years. But in ’22 — in the first months of the war — many of the soldiers who were trained in Lublin and cooperated with Polish forces were high-ranking in the Ukrainian Army,” the spokesperson said.

Down the line, the new center might potentially be a key mechanism to train Ukrainian civilians to fight for volunteer military forces.

“We have about 2 million Ukrainians in Poland — refugees — and some of them want to fight,” the Polish government spokesperson explained.

Notably, among other pledges, the new Washington Summit Declaration issued by allies Wednesday formalizes the establishment of the JATEC and refers to the new entity as “an important pillar of practical cooperation, to identify and apply lessons from Russia’s war against Ukraine and increase Ukraine’s interoperability with NATO.”

And during a joint press conference on Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also explicitly pointed to the new analytics and training center as an important element in the alliance’s overarching initiative to support the war-torn nation.

“We are thinking about real, strong steps from very strong people. But speaking about the war, you can’t even sometimes use the word ‘success.’ But success is your work and your comfort with your life. Success is when you don’t lose your family, and the success to survive. To win this war, that will be a real success for us,” Zelenskyy told reporters at the briefing.

At the summit, the allies also committed to following an “irreversible path” to NATO membership for Ukraine.