Ukraine Joins the NSPA's Security Cooperation Support Partnership — NATO's Procurement Agency Cleared to Contract Firms Since April
Luxembourg, 22 October 2026
Key points
- The NATO Support and Procurement Agency announced on 22 October that Ukraine has joined its Security Cooperation Support Partnership, set up in 2025; the other members are Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and NATO headquarters
- After the North Atlantic Council's approval in April 2026, the agency can issue solicitations to and sign contracts with Ukrainian companies
- On 14 October the agency held a Ukraine Industry Day in Kyiv with about 150 Ukrainian companies; in March an NSPA deputy director said about 80 Ukrainian companies were registered with access to its tenders
- The agency says it has mobilised about EUR 400 million for Ukraine through the Comprehensive Assistance Package trust fund and EUR 219 million through the IT Capability Coalition
Ukraine has joined one of the NATO procurement agency's support partnerships, six months after allies cleared the agency to contract Ukrainian companies directly.
Support partnerships are how the agency works: nations with a common requirement join one, and the agency buys and sustains on their behalf. Membership puts Ukraine among the partnership's customers, beside five allies and NATO headquarters. Jacqueline Borsboom, the agency's director of support to operations, told the Financial Times that it gives Ukraine "a more structured framework to leverage a broad range of capabilities that we offer: procurement expertise, support services and access to established industrial base". Aliona Hetmanchuk, head of Ukraine's mission to NATO, said she hoped it would become an "important gateway into NATO's defence industrial ecosystem". The step was prepared months ahead. In March, Colin Munce, the agency's deputy director for operations, said Serhiy Boyev, Ukraine's deputy defence minister, had approved accession.
The partnership is a buying channel, and its scale will show in contracts, not in the membership. PURL, through which NATO says allies have funded more than USD 6 billion of US weapons since July 2025, is separate from it, and the Ukraine sums the agency itself reports are in the hundreds of millions. The April decision matters more for traffic in the other direction, from Ukrainian manufacturers into NATO procurement. Signal No. 174 carried the membership. The test is whether those manufacturers win business: the agency has not announced a contract awarded to a Ukrainian company under the April approval.
