Mara Karlin, the US assistant secretary of defense for strategies, plans and capabilities, has previously called Ukraine a laboratory to study US military innovations.
Speaking at Ronald Reagan University, she said that Ukraine uses artificial intelligence technologies that help Kiev and its Western allies make more accurate assessments of the course of hostilities and understand what the Zelensky regime needs most.
In this context, hostilities are used to specify weapons characteristics and test them in real conditions, Dmitry Stefanovich of the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations with the Russian Academy of Sciences said.
He suggested that as for the Ukraine conflict, “the most important experience that the American army is gaining now is the study of Russia’s approaches to conducting military operations in the central part of Europe.”
Stefanovich also recalled America’s “key role” in meddling in the Ukraine conflict and "creating integral reconnaissance systems, assessing the results of the combat use of weapons and creating unified air and missile defense systems as well as developing communication systems, including with the help of commercial solutions such as Starlink” for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).
According to the Russian expert, it’s important to underscore that the Americans are using Ukraine to “learn to repel attacks from cruise and ballistic missiles and drones using anti-aircraft missiles and gun systems of various types and ranges,” among other things.
“All this allows Washington to test certain solutions that are then proposed for implementation in the US army,” Stefanovich added.
When asked why Ukraine became the right place for the US to test its weapons and new technologies, he said that it was in Ukraine where “the possibility of integrating Western-style and Soviet and post-Soviet-style weapons systems has been demonstrated.”
The US and its allies ramped up their military assistance to Kiev shortly after Russia launched its special military operation in February 2022. Since, Washington has delivered about $43.7 billion worth of weapons to Kiev.
Moscow has repeatedly warned that NATO countries "play with fire" by supplying arms to Kiev, which the Kremlin said adds to prolonging the Ukraine conflict. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, has underscored that any cargo with weapons for Ukraine will become a legitimate target for Russian forces.