NATO countries are developing a 10-year plan to restore the Ukrainian defense industry.

According to POLITICO, in order to ensure the full compatibility of Ukraine with NATO, the parties will consider the requirements of defense planning.

“We will be looking at defense planning requirements to get Ukraine fully interoperable with NATO. It’s about shifting away from Soviet equipment … to NATO-compatible Western equipment,” the official said.

While restocking their own arsenals of weapons and equipment, alliance officials have already held a meeting this month to start planning for assistance to the Ukrainian defense industry.

But these new Alliance efforts will focus only on Ukraine.

“We’ll be looking at ways to try and rebuild Ukraine’s defense industry,” said the official.

NATO members intend to make broader efforts to go beyond meeting Ukraine’s daily battlefield needs, and ultimately turn Ukraine into a NATO country by definition, “even if it is not a member of the Alliance.”

The first meeting between alliance countries and representatives of Ukraine on the issue of the plan being developed will be held next week.

The meeting will mark the beginning of a long process of “rapprochement between Ukraine and the alliance in training and equipping” the Ukrainian military.

The sixth meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (the so-called Ramstein format – ed.) was held at NATO headquarters in Brussels on October 12.

Oleksii Reznikov, the Minister of Defense of Ukraine, also arrived there to familiarize the Alliance ministers with the latest events in Ukraine and the country’s urgent needs for the winter.

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said the partners are ready to support Ukraine in the long term.