Photo: Jürgen Randma / Government Office of Estonia
“Ukraine is ready to engage more and join JEF as a member.” This statement by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was made during his address on Tuesday to the 10-nation Joint Expeditionary Force, or JEF. The leaders of the northern European group met this week for their JEF Summit in Tallinn, Estonia. While the prospects of Ukraine joining the JEF soon appear slim, the group is increasingly focused on Ukraine. More broadly, the summit also signaled the JEF’s intent to do more to counter growing threats to the region’s critical underwater infrastructure and continue to take on more of the burden of defending Europe as president-elect Donald Trump prepares to reenter the White House.
This week’s summit in Tallinn marked ten years of the JEF. Established in 2014, the JEF—which is led by the United Kingdom and includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden—emerged from NATO’s Framework Nations Concept. The concept encourages small groups of like-minded nations to work together to overcome barriers to defense cooperation. Each coalition is led by a “framework” nation.
Over the last decade, the JEF has become the quiet workhorse of defense and security in northern Europe. The JEF was established as part of NATO’s adaptation to Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Since becoming fully operational in 2018, it has become an important layer in the European security landscape. In 2022, the JEF ramped up reassurance and deterrence missions in the region after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
At last year’s summit JEF leaders took action to combat emerging threats to the region’s critical undersea infrastructure. They activated, for the first time in the group’s history, a “JEF Response Option” (JRO) in which member nations deployed 29 vessels and 11 aircraft to patrol one million square miles of sea in Northern European waters. This was followed by the second JRO in June, “Nordic Warden,” which saw 28 ships and 6 aircraft deployed to track 33 vessels of interest.
Kyiv might not be a full member of the JEF, but the focus of this summit was squarely on Ukraine. As the summit declaration stated: “Russia’s illegal and brutal war of aggression against Ukraine [remains] our foremost concern.”
The JEF nations have long been at the vanguard of support for Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute’s latest data, the top seven donor nations by percent of GDP given to Ukraine are JEF nations. As a recent report by RUSI points out: “Support for Ukraine has become a major political output of the JEF. The 10 JEF members have committed $11.1 billion more aid to Ukraine than the 18 remaining European NATO members.” After February 2022, the JEF ramped up reassurance and deterrence missions in the region and provided a political forum for northern European leaders to coordinate their support for Ukraine. President Zelenskyy has joined several meetings of JEF leaders, while Ukraine was invited to observe JEF exercises.
The summit declaration thus highlighted the JEF nations’ “unwavering and longstanding support for a sovereign Ukraine and its people for as long as it takes.” It also cited the EUR 12 billion in military assistance already allocated by JEF nations for 2025 and pledged “to further expand our training and equipment offer to Ukraine.” It committed the JEF to deeper cooperation with Ukraine’s defense industry, a strategy that would also boost overall European defense capacity.
At the summit, JEF leaders also reaffirmed support for Zelenskyy’s Victory Plan and “reiterated that a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace requires full and unconditional withdrawal of all Russian forces and military assets from the entire territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders.” To help achieve this goal the summit declaration described how the JEF is “committed to strengthening Ukraine’s hand by further degrading Putin’s war machine and reducing his sources of revenue.” One example was the agreement before the summit between the JEF nations, plus Germany and Poland, to target Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ships used to illegally transport oil, arms, and grain in violation of international sanctions.
Another avenue of support highlighted by the declaration was Ukraine’s recent participation in the JEF’s flagship exercise, Joint Protector. During October and November, Ukrainian officials joined over 300 JEF personnel in a forward deployed headquarters in Liepāja, Latvia. The exercise tested the JEF’s ability to respond quickly to a crisis. It involved a “near-real scenario” in which JEF forces deliver several concurrent missions. Crucially, the exercise also allowed the JEF to learn from Ukraine. As Luke Pollard, UK minister for the Armed Forces, explained, “The participation of our Ukrainian partners highlights the exercise’s importance, ensuring that we can learn from Ukraine’s hard-fought combat experience.”
Although Ukraine has moved much closer to the JEF over the past year, the prospects of President Zelenskyy’s aspiration to “join JEF as a member” remain slim. Membership appears limited to its “core regions” of the High North, North Atlantic, and Baltic Sea. Some have argued this is “short sighted” and that if “JEF truly prioritizes regional security and innovation, it cannot afford to ignore Ukraine’s contribution.” Even so, given their location, more likely candidates for JEF membership would be Germany and Poland. But Germany’s constitution forbids its armed forces from operating with coalitions of the willing. With the region’s largest army, Poland may be too big and land-centric for the air- and maritime-focused JEF. Officials from smaller nations also worry about being sidelined, “As soon as you have a Pole in the room, the discussion is all about Poland.”
Although the JEF will remain focused on supporting and learning from Ukraine for the foreseeable future, it is also focused on the enduring challenge Russia poses to European security over the next decade, beyond the war and beyond Putin. As the declaration stated, “We committed to a long-term policy to constrain, contest, and counter Russia’s aggression and threats to regional security, extending beyond its current regime and its war against Ukraine.” This broad, long-term commitment to European security matches the JEF’s stated ambition to deliver “sub-threshold peacetime responses through to full-spectrum interventions during times of crisis or conflict, both in its core regions and beyond.”
As Ed Arnold of RUSI points out, such a high level of ambition will require more resources. The JEF has been focused on securing undersea infrastructure, but even with a significant boost in activity and force presence over the last 12 months, it was unable to prevent the most recent cable damage incident. In part, this is because such hybrid threats are difficult to deter, but it also reflects the scale of the challenge.
As NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte described in his first speech last week, the scale of NATO’s defense and deterrence challenge is much larger still. According to Rutte, a revanchist Kremlin with a wartime economy means that “We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years. . . . What is happening in Ukraine could happen here too.” This requires a much greater ambition for defense spending and industrial capacity. As Rutte put it, “It is time to shift to a wartime mindset. And turbo-charge our defence production and defence spending.”
In practice, this means transforming NATO with a focus on European capabilities and investing in a credible warfighting force. The JEF is well-placed to contribute to both objectives. As well as being the leading supporters of Ukraine, the JEF nations are also some of the top defense spenders in NATO. In the summit declaration, JEF nations committed to “spend well beyond 2 [percent] of GDP”—even if the summit hosts would have preferred a higher target. They also made a “European commitment to invest robustly into defence” and to “[galvanize] European defence industry”—both of which would boost both Ukraine and NATO’s own defense and deterrence.
The final paragraph of the summit declaration emphasized the “transatlantic bond” between Europe and the United States and looked forward “to working closely with the incoming U.S. administration on our shared security and defence interests.” The JEF is well placed to strengthen transatlantic relations, too. President-elect Trump has reiterated the United States’ commitment to NATO—even if he did so in his own style, by suggesting this remains contingent on European allies “paying their bills.” The JEF gives its members a platform to do both; it demonstrates how northern European nations are taking charge of security in their region in a forum that includes ten NATO allies and is closely linked to NATO institutions by design. As Dan Baer and Sophia Besch of Carnegie put it, “Ramping up the Joint Expeditionary Force would contribute to European security and prepare the continent for a second Trump administration.”
By the time JEF leaders meet in Oslo, Norway, for their next summit in May, President Trump will have been in office for 100 days. That is a long time in international politics but a blink of an eye for the 10-year-old JEF. With a turbulent period ahead for European security and a burgeoning relationship with Ukraine, the next decade will be a busy one for the JEF.
Sean Monaghan is a visiting fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
