Since 2014, Ukrainians increasingly like to compare their country to Israel. They want to copy my country’s success at creating a potent military force for defense.
The problem with this idea is that most Ukrainians do not know Israel’s full story. If they did, they would realize Ukraine is not taking that path.
I would know: I trained Ukrainian soldiers.
Immediate grave danger
The formation of Israel’s armed forces was based upon a clear understanding in Israeli society that their lives and the mere existence of their country was far from guaranteed — in fact, the young state immediately found itself in grave danger. The goal of Israel’s enemies was quite unlike that of Russia.
The Jews in the Land of Israel clearly understood that changing the country’s political course or adopting various language laws could not increase their chances of survival. If they lost the war, the they would inevitably be “dumped into the sea,” as the enemy promised. And Israel — a state that had reappeared after 2,000 years of exile — would cease to exist.
Final clarity that Israel would survive only came in 1967, in the first hours of Operation Moked during the Six-Day War. The tiny state’s tiny army destroyed the air forces of all countries in the Arab coalition combined. More than 300 combat aircraft were not even given the chance to take off. For the following six days, the land component of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with the support of its Air Force, made history by more than doubling Israel’s territory.
In the early 1970s, despite all the American aid, Israel was still investing 30 percent of its gross domestic product into the armed forces. Not 5 percent, but 30! And unlike in Ukraine today, Israeli leaders would never have been able to sell their best weapons until their own army was fully equipped.
Tourists stand next to a silhouette sculpture of an Israeli soldier at an army post on Mount Bental in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on March 22, 2019. (AFP)
At that time, the IDF was the world’s largest army in relation to population size. Almost all the country’s men and women were in its active reserve. Without significant resources, Israel realized something that its Arab neighbors could not: Success in war depends on the development of one’s own science and technology.
During its first 20 years of existence, Israel’s lack of serious political and financial backing forced the country’s industry to learn how to rebuild, refurbish, and salvage every scrap at its disposal. All this hardware had arrived in Israel before its creation as a state.
While Israel was only able to buy airplanes from France before the Six-Day War, Arab states were being flooded with thousands of modern Soviet-made tanks, airplanes, and all kinds of military equipment. Israel’s adversaries did not have to worry about refurbishing their old tanks and armored personnel carriers. They could acquire everything they needed from the Soviets.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli tank gunners did not have night vision equipment, but the Syrians did. As a result, Israelis started producing everything that they could not purchase. This self-sufficiency led Israel to supply all its military needs on its own, from its own assault rifles to its own sea-to-sea missiles and Merkava tanks. These missiles would sink Soviet-built ships, while the Merkava are considered to be one of the best in their class.
Can you see anything similar happening in Ukraine? No. The bulk of Ukraine’s military hardware is still what remains of the old Soviet army depots.
Only a few nations — including the U.S., Singapore, South Korea, and several others — can compare to Israel’s cynicism toward its leaders. No matter how great, brilliant and distinguished these national leaders may be, they are not above the law. They can and will be investigated and harshly prosecuted for any crimes, including corruption.
Meanwhile, impunity reins among Ukraine’s top defense officials, like Oleh Hladkovskyi, the former deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, whom journalists implicated in a massive military production corruption scheme.
The ugly truth is that Ukraine’s authorities are not even close to be following the Israeli model of successfully building a military. The country’s defense sector remains deeply Soviet-esque, corrupt, and ineffective.
Training Ukraine
In 2014, I was invited to train Ukrainian fighters in many different army units: the infantry, National Guard, SWAT police, and Special Operations units. I’ve worked on creating organic units out of a groups of motivated volunteers so that they will not fall apart in real combat.
Today, some of them are officers in the Special Forces or reconnaissance units, while others are regular citizens who left the army unsatisfied with the “great reforms” that former President Petro Poroshenko claims to have carried out.
I also keep in touch with a few other foreigners who trained or fought for Ukraine: former soldiers or officers from Germany, the U.S., and Israel. Unlike some of their counterparts (who get paid for short training missions thousands of miles from the warzone and are happy with the Ukrainian forces’ evolution), these men are less optimistic.
Ukrainian soldiers carry a machine gun in their trench on the front line with Russia-backed separatists near the town of Zolote, Luhansk region on April 20, 2019. (AFP)
I don’t think I made that great of a contribution to Ukraine’s defense capabilities. But I do know that Poroshenko and his colleagues — who pretend to be the nation’s saviors — greatly overestimated these capabilities.
Because I have not only trained regular soldiers, but have also been actively involved in creating a new “NATO standards” infantry brigade in the National Guard framework, I have seen many higher-level commanders. I have constantly met with National Guard and Internal Affairs officials and military attaches from NATO and the U.S.
I have seen the official documents, and I knew how much money was spent by the National Guard on equipment and different projects.
If I were a Ukrainian employee or an experienced bureaucrat, I might not have paid much attention to the minute details. But after seeing the disconnect between generals’ salaries and their lifestyles, between their declared values and their deeds — including the so-called “implementation of NATO standards” and their unwillingness and inability to implement them in reality — I made my own conclusions.
By that time, I had quite a few direct conversations with high-ranking officials at the National Guard. After one of those talks, I was accused by one of the generals of working for the Israeli Mossad and I was interrogated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). By comparison, the SBU interrogators were nice to me.
The general who reported me for “hiring National Guard soldiers for the Mossad” couldn’t know that I was originally invited to assist Ukraine by another general, a former deputy head of Ukraine’s counterintelligence service, and had been cleared a number of times by other secret service structures, including military intelligence.
As I write these lines, I am still laughing. This is so typical of former Soviet officers to accuse people they don’t like of being agents of Western intelligence services!
By 2016, I had made my own conclusions:
With such theft, corruption, and resistance to reforms, both the army and the National Guard will not be modernized in the foreseeable future. Ukraine has a few well-trained former personnel who may help build a “small Soviet Army” that can still face a big one, Russia. But I could not help with that undertaking. Thus, my assistance to Ukrainian forces largely ended.
The mass outflow of motivated volunteers since 2016 — despite an increase in military personnel’s salaries — only assured me that I had drawn the right conclusions.
No ‘Israeli scenario’
Once in a while, I visit infantry or Special Forces units to either train them or deliver aid. Lately, I have been at forefront positions of the current conflict on the outskirts of Donetsk. I saw the obvious: a group of individuals fighting under the Ukrainian banner who lack the most basic necessities. What I have seen can be called neither “the strongest army in Europe,” as Poroshenko claims, nor a modern army at all.
During the Iraqi campaign in 1991, we already saw what happens to a million poorly trained soldiers with large amounts of old scrap. Ukraine is not even near that low Iraqi standard. It does not have such large numbers of soldiers and it still has not learned how to mobilize them quickly. Total mobilization takes months because fighters attached to a unit in Mykolaiv may be living in Kyiv.
To paraphrase Napoleon: “There are no roads in Ukraine – only directions.”
Ukrainian officials don’t realize the obvious: if Russia attacks, directions will also cease to exist.
A Ukrainian soldier looks at a sunbeam shining through a bullet hole in the roof of a building in the Promzona combat area near Avdiyivka on June 21, 2018. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Returning to the Israel comparison, five years of reforms in Ukraine have never approached what the Arab states did in only a two- or three-year period. After their worst defeats in battle, they were able to put tens of thousands of tanks on the battlefield in a shorter amount of time. They only lost again due to their equipment’s poor quality and their soldiers’ low motivation, not their numbers.
Israel’s adversaries — which were buying, rather than producing their own equipment — fell infinitely behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, the Egyptian army receives $1 billion dollars in military aid a year, but corruption and a lack of technological capacity — including education — make it weak. According to open source information, the Egyptian military is so weak that it cannot even cope with the ISIS Bedouins in the Sinai Desert without the help of the Israeli Air Force.
Modern Ukraine isn’t reliving Israeli history and its situation is radically different. By using language and other national symbols in political clan or private interests, Ukrainian politicians are damaging national values. In fact, they are trying to have their voters at each other’s throats in order to eat a bigger piece of the electoral pie.
I do not know whether Zelenskiy can do better. But until this day, there have been no leaders capable of implementing a cooperative policy uniting as many stakeholders as possible. And the people — many living in dire poverty — play into the game of their corrupt officials, shaking their fists and threatening each other with the next mass protest or even revolution.
Tzvi Arieli is a former Israel Defense Forces serviceman, who retired with the rank of sergeant in 2003 and later served as a counter-terror officer through 2008. He has lived in Ukraine since 2013 and provided training to Ukrainian combat formations on a voluntary basis.
