Defence-related assistance represents material assistance or know-how, which is given to support the development of national defence in target country and is distributed in accordance with Estonia’s general development co-operation principles and security political considerations.

Defence-related assistance is, above all, directed to support security sector reforms and is deemed official development assistance. Within the governance area of the Ministry of Defence, the outreach policies are implemented in accordance with the Outreach Policy, approved by the Minister of Defence in spring 2008, which identified Afghanistan, Georgia, Montenegro and Ukraine as our target countries.

Defence-related assistance programmes have been actively implemented since the beginning of the 2000s. We have supported the studies of target countries’ students in the Baltic Defence College and organised advisory visits to both Estonia and the target countries. Above all, the target countries are interested in our successful NATO integration process and also reforms, implemented in the sphere of defence, while lately, more and more interest is demonstrated in the modern developments, such as cyber defence.

Apart from bi-lateral efforts, Estonia also makes use of multilateral international programmes for the implementation of the outreach policies, in particular various NATO initiatives for supporting the partner countries. We also support the activities of Geneva institutions, advising the security sector reforms, such as DCAF and GCSP.

One of the most successful forms of multilateral co-operation in the sphere of defence is the Nordic-Baltic initiative, used to advise the officials of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and implement various projects in the Western Balkan (Estonia participates, with Norway and Denmark, in reforming the defence ministry of Montenegro, and on advising them about NATO integration issues). During the first half of 2009, it was decided to extend the Nordic-Baltic initiative to Georgia.