The European Commission announced the results of tenders within the framework of the European Defense Fund worth more than one billion euros to support 54 unfinished joint European defense research and development projects.
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As European Pravda writes, the European Commission informed about this.
The selected projects will support technological excellence in a wide range of defense capabilities in critical areas, including cyber defense, land, air and sea warfare, defense of space objects or chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense.
MARTE projects. and FMBTech, for example, will bring together more than 70 industrial players and research organizations to work on the design and systems of a main battle tank platform that will be used across Europe.
Funding will also be directed to projects that will contribute to strategic air transportation of bulky cargo, which is a key opportunity for rapid support of missions around the world.
Under the EU Defense Innovation Scheme (EUDIS), small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups and new entrants to the defense sector have taken advantage of a number of opportunities provided by the 2023 European Defense Fund funding round. For the first time, 4 projects will support the transfer of civilian innovations to the defense sector.
The European Commission noted that the competitions demonstrated “the strong and constantly growing interest of EU defense industry and research organizations, regardless of size and geographic location, in cross-border cooperation and joint contribution to the development of the EU's strategic capabilities”.
Recall that at the beginning of May, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, announced that the EU had started work to open the Defense Innovation Office in Kyiv.
At the same time the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, expressed his belief that EU countries could purchase weapons for Ukraine from Ukrainian defense companies and quickly hand them over for military support to Kyiv.