Central Europe and Ukraine: What US defense industry needs to know
14 May 2026

Central and Eastern Europe has become Europe’s defense engine room — the continent’s
fastest-adapting arena, with the largest acquisition pipelines, the most urgent ammunition and MRO programs and the industrial build-out where surge production is being located. Ukraine has become an innovation engine in its own right, reshaping how procurement, testing and fielding are done.

For US companies, the opening is real. So are the obstacles: partnership rules that have tightened, local content and security-of-supply expectations that have hardened, a regulatory landscape that remains fragmented country by country and financing and compliance questions that catch many US entrants off guard.

Join Wolf Theiss, a leading Central and Eastern European law firm with 13 offices across CEE and SEE plus Brussels, for a 90-minute breakfast briefing with Bryan W. Jardine, Regional Defense Team Lead, and Taras Dumych, Managing Partner of the Kyiv office and board member of the Ukrainian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association — on what is changing, where the real barriers sit and how US industry can position itself for the decade ahead.

Topics addressed:

• Europe’s new defense architecture: ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030, SAFE, EDIP and the European Competitiveness Fund
• The obstacles US companies actually hit: FDI screening, export controls, subcontractor vetting, supply-chain financing
• What “industrial partnership” now requires: security of supply, local content, EU ownership-and-control, offsets and technology transfer
• Central Europe as the engine room: acquisition cycles, ammunition and MRO programs, surge production across Poland, Romania, the Baltics and the Czech–Slovak cluster
• Ukraine and the innovation feedback loop: battlefield-driven procurement, venture capital flows, testing and rapid deployment alongside Ukrainian counterparts
• Transatlantic frictions, practically handled: ITAR, FMS vs. co-production, getting US-led programs into European production lines

Time & Place

Date: 14 May 2026
Time: 08:30 – 10:00 EDT
Location: Embassy of Austria, 3524 International Ct NW, Washington, DC

Registration
by invitation only