Armament directors of the US and partner countries are meeting in Brussels this week to discuss a long-term arms assistance strategy for Ukraine.

The Defense Post reported about this.

Bill LaPlante, US Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, will lead the first meeting gathering the national armament directors.

The meeting is scheduled for September 28. More than 40 members of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group will participate in the meeting.

The focus of the meeting would be discovering the ways to shore up arms production for Ukraine and identifying the capabilities that the country will likely need in the future.

“We will also discuss what capabilities Ukraine is likely to need in the future like long-range fires and air defense and how to posture the broad industrial base of the contact group to meet those needs,” stated the US Department of Defense at the briefing.

According to a Pentagon official, the discussion will include a production request for “things like gun barrels, ball bearings, steel casings,” and “obsolescent parts and microchips”.

He added that “interchangeable systems” provided to Ukrainian forces with modifications to “bridge the capability gaps” will also be discussed.

A long-term strategy will be discussed to ensure that the Ukrainian equipment would remain in operational condition in the long run.

Previously, Oleksii Reznikov, Minister of Defense of Ukraine, reported that the United States has not finally completed the formation of the lend-lease program for Ukraine. The Americans will, at the moment, continue providing assistance within the framework of the four previously adopted programs.

“The final understanding of how Lend-Lease will look like is yet to be born. Because our partners have not yet finished forming the program,” Reznikov said.

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine has made a call to hand over experimental samples of weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Defense companies of the United States could use the war in Ukraine to test their pilot projects.