BRUSSELS – Ukraine’s political and military leadership bears a huge responsibility to harness growing public support to join NATO’s collective security alliance in light of Russia’s aggression, Yegor Bozhok, Ukraine’s acting chief envoy to NATO, told the Kyiv Post.
“We have to turn this support into real action,” Bozhok said, who was the deputy head of Ukraine’s mission to NATO in 2005-2009 and acting head for the past two years. “Because being a NATO member is not about consuming protection…you have to be able to protect at an appropriate level.”
Surveys conducted by Kyiv-based policy centers Razumkov Center and Democratic Initiatives have found that the public’s desire to join NATO has risen to around 50 percent from 12-15 percent 18 months ago.
To modernize Ukraine’s security and defense sectors, and make the armed forces a mobile unit with streamlined command and control capabilities, Bozhok said, “you have to have a complex mid-term vision.”
“You cannot just reform a part of the sector, a part of the armed forces. You have to reform this part in the context of broader reform. This is what we are now talking about with NATO,” he said.
Ukraine plans to submit its vision for transforming the military at the next NATO summit of heads of state and government in Warsaw next July, he added.
Although Ukraine’s army is “capable of protecting the country at least at the minimum required level,” according to Bozhok, “we are going to discuss this (reform) program in Warsaw and we also expect that NATO will streamline its support to Ukraine in order to make it tailor-made to our needs, which will be described in this mid-term program.”
But there’s still “resistance and reluctance” to change within Ukraine’s military, he said.
Ukraine’s political and military leadership are ready to make the necessary changes, but “subordinate structures,” who share the responsibility for transforming the military, “is where we still have a huge problem,” he said.
He declined to elaborate on which branches of the military were not receptive to reform and which levels were putting up resistance.
“I wouldn’t be overly precise in this context, but we have a case where (there is) the strong will of the political leadership, strong will of the Ukrainian people, and somewhere in between there is still a problem,” Bozhok said.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
