Reformer of the week – Glen Grant
Glen Grant, a British military analyst and former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, has criticized the progress of Ukraine’s military reforms and its failure to conform to NATO standards.
He wrote in a Jan. 31 op-ed for the Kyiv Post that “the Ukrainian Army gets better every day, but overall it is not one of the best in Europe because it has some critical organizational flaws.”
“Giving the army Javelin anti-tank missiles will not remove those flaws, and may even make them worse,” Grant said. “This is because there is no doctrine, equipping and training for doing this. The vision of a mobile army is lacking at all levels.”
Grant said that Ukraine does not have the “operational ability to deliver force anywhere and win battles.” He argued that, to win in Russia’s war against Ukraine, the nation must shred its Soviet military mentality and completely transform its army.
As a result of the critique, Ukrainian authorities launched a smear campaign against Grant, going as far as to deny the well-known fact that he was an advisor to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.
Natan Chazin, a Ukrainian veteran of Russia’s war in the Donbas and a former advisor to Chief of the General Staff Viktor Muzhenko, wrote an even harsher op-ed on Feb. 14.
He argued that military reform in Ukraine was “dead” and said that Ukraine’s army cannot be “transformed to the state of even marginal effectiveness.” Chazin called Ukraine’s military “a small Soviet army.”
Anti-reformer of the week – Petro Tsyhykal
Petro Tsyhykal heads Ukraine’s State Border Guard, which on Feb. 12 arrested and deported ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to Poland without a court warrant.
Video footage of Saakashvili’s detention in a Kyiv café showed him being brutally pushed by armed border guards and grabbed by his hair. Saakashvili said that later the men had hit him in the face, threatened to shoot him, and had forced him onto the floor of a bus.
Thus the State Border Guard, the police and the State Migration Service helped President Petro Poroshenko get rid of his most outspoken political opponent.
The State Migration Service said on Feb. 12 it had “re-admitted” Saakashvili to Poland because a court had found him guilty of illegally crossing the border and because another court had rejected his political asylum application in January. The service claimed no court ruling was necessary for the re-admission.
Saakashvili’s lawyer Pavlo Bogomazov and independent lawyers Roman Kuybida and Vitaly Tytych dismissed these explanations as absurd, saying that Saakashvili’s re-admission was only possible if combined with deportation, and a court warrant for deportation is necessary for that.
Even if Saakashvili had been lawfully arrested with a deportation ruling, he should have had 30 days to appeal against it, and deportation could only happen once the appeals court had made its ruling.
The Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal on Feb. 5 rejected Saakashvili’s political asylum appeal. But his lawyers filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, and, under Ukrainian law, his deportation was illegal during this appeal stage. His residence permit from Ukraine’s State Migration Service is valid until March 1.
Moreover, Saakashvili had a legal status in Ukraine – that of a permanent stateless resident – and therefore could not be deported regardless of asylum status, his lawyers argued. Under Ukrainian law, a person who was a permanent resident of Ukraine before being stripped of citizenship is considered a permanent stateless resident, which happened in Saakashvili’s case.
Saakashvili and his supporters also argued that he could not be expelled from the country because the cancellation of his citizenship by Poroshenko in July contradicted Ukrainian and international law, the Constitution and due process, which is denied by Ukrainian authorities. His lawyers said that his extradition or deportation was impossible before a court decided on the legality of the cancellation of his citizenship.
