Ukraine’s Defense Ministry is supposed to be headed by a civilian starting from Jan. 1, 2019, according to the draft bill on Ukraine’s national security.
The aim of having a civilian lead the defense ministry is to impose strong democratic civilian control of the country’s military – a prerequisite for NATO membership. Ukraine is seeking to bring its military up to NATO standards by the end of 2020.
This model is a natural one for Western democracies, were ultimate strategic decision-taking on defense is done by elected civilian politicians, rather than career military officers. For the alliance nations, having a civilian government member who is responsible for shaping defense and security policy goals, managing military resources, and – crucially – overseeing the efficiency of the use of resources, has been standard practice for decades.
In NATO countries, the military advise politicians, keep the army combat ready, and ponder the nitty-gritty of defending the nation. But they are kept at arm’s length from government, so that they are no tempted to abuse the immense power they can wield.
President Petro Poroshenko promised the nation that Ukraine would adopt this model when in June 2016 he signed the Strategic Defensive Bulletin, a clear step-by-step roadmap to reform the country’s military in compliance with NATO standards.
And the new national security bill, drafted by Presidential Administration and reportedly reviewed by the European Union, NATO, and U.S. envoys in Ukraine, was supposedly meant to achieve civilian control of the military.
However, it looks like the previous legislation was a huge hoax.
An earlier version of the draft seen by the Kyiv Post back in January cited the U.S. National Security Act of 1947, saying that defense minister, as well as all of his or her deputies, “shall be appointed from civilian life” at least five years after leaving active service duty in the military or other security agencies.
However, the bill allowed the appointment of a minister with a shorter cooling-off period with the consent of the Verkhovna Rada.
In fact, something similar happened with the currently serving U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a former four-star U.S. Marine Corps general who retired from active duty back in 2013. In late 2016, when president-elect Donald J. Trump nominated Mattis as his defense secretary, and the U.S. Congress granted a waiver to let the former general take up office without having completed his seven years out of uniform, as demanded by U.S. legislation.
But in the latest version of the Ukrainian draft bill seen by the Kyiv Post, there is no longer the stipulation that a civilian defense minister, if they previously served in the military, must be out of uniform for five years before they can be nominated as defense minister.
On Jan. 17, the new draft was reviewed and greenlighted by Ukraine’s Defense and Security Council, and sources close to the drafting of the bill say this version will be submitted to parliament by President Poroshenko soon.
The document was probably altered to allow Ukraine’s current defense minister, Stepan Poltorak, an active duty military serviceman with the rank of General of the Army, to stay on in his job after Jan. 1, 2019 as a civilian official.
With no five-year cooling off provision, there is no need for President Poroshenko to seek a brand new defense minister “from civilian life” as demanded under NATO-style legislation. It would be enough for him to simply retire Poltorak from active duty, tell him to stuff his general’s get-up in the nearest wardrobe, nominate him for the job again, gain parliament’s approval, and then present this with a fanfare as another step forward for the Ukrainian military towards NATO compliance.
But would Poltorak, a top general who has been in uniform since 1983, really be eligible to be defense minister if he became a civilian literally overnight? Would the spirit of the reform be honored?
Adopting NATO standards of the democratic civilian control means a lot more than just formally stripping the old Soviet-era defense minister of his general’s stars and letting him stay on in his job. Above all, it means having a civilian government official who is free of all formal and informal influence by the military, and whose basic job is to make sure that every hryvnia of the country’s Hr 86 billion ($3.1 billion) armed forces budget is spent properly and effectively to make Ukraine’s defense stronger.
In Ukraine, where corruption and excessive secrecy in the defense sector are still a huge problem, the appointment of a civilian – someone with no close ties to the military – is a matter of urgency.
Yet army man Poltorak is apparently expecting to be reappointed to his ministerial post, this time as a civilian, some time this year. According to him, the Ministry of Defense expects the new national security bill to be approved in the first quarter of 2018.
Asked, during a Feb. 3 interview with the Voice of America host Myroslava Gongadze, how close Ukraine is to imposing civilian leadership over the defense ministry, the general, who was wearing civilian clothes, replied: “Judging from the fact that I’m not wearing a uniform, we’re probably already close enough.”
