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Russia's Foreign Ministry said Monday that NATO is increasingly treating Ukraine as a "testing ground" for current and future military technologies, accusing the alliance of advancing a new weapons development program explicitly designed to target Russian airbases.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a commentary that information published on official NATO websites, including the alliance's representation in Ukraine, points to the launch of a new tender for developing advanced weapons systems based on lessons learned from the fighting Kyiv has waged against Russia.
"It clearly follows from the explanations that the relevant weapons developments are conceived primarily in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with an explicit aim of deploying them as quickly as possible to carry out specific and highly ambitious combat tasks that Kyiv, with the active support of NATO countries, has unsuccessfully tried to accomplish during the current conflict with Russia," she said.
According to Zakharova, the program specifically concerns the creation of weapons capable of inflicting mass damage and long-term disabling of Russian airfields and air bases, including deep inside Russian territory.
She said the strategic goal is to ensure "sustained denial of operations conducted by the enemy from airfields," to achieve "a fundamental undermining of the adversary's air campaign."
Zakharova stated that the project is being advanced by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in coordination with a joint analysis, training, and education center established with Ukraine. She emphasized that this center is openly positioned as an "element of the alliance's formal command structure."
The spokesperson said the requirements set for potential Western and Ukrainian developers include, among other things, "full autonomy" of weapons platforms and the ability to maintain combat effectiveness under conditions of jammed navigation signals, as well as the integration of artificial intelligence elements, including for target guidance.
She said the requirements allow for the absence of "continuous human control" over the resulting weapons systems, while their operational range is effectively unrestricted.
Zakharova said the broader picture is consistent with an already familiar pattern.
According to the spokesperson, NATO and Ukrainian command structures are rapidly integrating to co-develop combat solutions against Russia. She added that their military-industrial sectors are merging, effectively transforming Western nations into Ukraine's strategic rear support base.
She said the North Atlantic alliance is "gradually losing the remnants of rationality and drifting into a zone of heightened risk," in an effort to extract maximum value from Ukraine in what she described as the "generously delegated," but in reality unenviable, role of a "testing ground" for existing and future military technologies and combat systems.
The spokesperson said NATO strategists are openly ignoring the destructive consequences of such "crash tests" for the post-Soviet country and clearly underestimating the danger of further including "horizontal" escalation of the Ukraine crisis.
She said Kyiv is intensifying its long-cherished efforts to provoke NATO into direct armed conflict with Russia, in a "false hope" of rescuing its desperate battlefield position, a goal she described as belonging to the category of "irrational fantasies."
"In the final analysis, we are forced to state that through its recklessly aggressive actions, the Ukrainian-NATO tandem is giving the Russian military additional grounds to demonstrate heightened attention to any enterprises involved in the development and production of weapons used against our country," Zakharova said.
"It is from these positions that we will assess both the current situation and the prospects for its further escalatory development," she concluded.
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