With the appointment of Andriy Zagorodnyuk as defense minister on Aug. 29, Ukraine’s security sector has begun a new chapter.
For the first time, a top defense official was appointed Western-style: from a pool of purely civilian managers, rather than from the old post-Soviet general pool or the ossified political establishment.
The new Defense Ministry now faces a tremendously long to-do list of reforms, many of which should have been accomplished long ago. In nearly all areas — from state procurement and rearmament to social security for personnel — the new ministry will have to deal with numerous problems and years of stagnation.
Moreover, Zagorodnyuk’s ministry will likely be the one to report to the nation on the accomplishments of the 2020 NATO-style military reforms. The final deadline for this reform is now just 16 months away.
Time is running out, but the good news is that the Zelensky team has all the leverage necessary to bring about key changes: it has full control of the Defense Ministry, the General Staff, and the parliament.
From now on, the potent new Defense Ministry has no excuse for failure.
From civilian life
Zagorodnyuk, 41, has built a career in the oil production business. Since 2005, he had led the Discovery Drilling Equipment company, producing various drilling machinery in Ukraine.
Following the outbreak of Russia’s war in Donbas in 2014, he became a civic activist and volunteer providing to Ukrainian combat formations deployed in the country’s east. He was known for providing the Ukrainian fighters with potbelly stoves and armored cash transit vehicles reequipped to function as battlefield ambulances.
In 2015–2017, he also chaired the Reform Project Office, a group of nearly 40 civilian volunteers advocating numerous improvements in the military such as better food supplies, e-procurement and unified medical databases for military personnel.
Zagorodnyuk’s former subordinates told the Kyiv Post that the new defense minister is a principled advocate of Westernization in the military.
“Andriy has always had a clear vision of army reforms,” says Anastasiya Lukashevych, a former senior communications officer with Stratcom Ukraine, a non-government organization that partnered with the Reform Project Office.
“In particular, in terms of army supplies, he relied on the experience of NATO nations. He trusts the opinion of experienced foreign advisers, which was not always the case for the Defense Ministry leadership at the time,” she says. “Andriy was always advocating transparency at the Defense Ministry, a full shift to electronic accounting systems. Because sometimes, a problem is not caused by a deficit, but rather by maze-like logistics and a lack of understanding of what resources are available.”
Zagorodnyuk has a finance degree from Oxford University and he worked for many years in business, so his communication style differs from that of traditional military leaders, Lukashevych notes.
In July 2019, Zagorodnyuk was appointed to the 5-member supervisor board of Ukraine’s defense production giant Ukroboronprom and also became a non-staff adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Against expectations, the president opted to choose Zagorodnyuk to head the Defense Ministry, and not Ivan Aparshyn, a retired colonel and veteran ministry bureaucrat perceived by many as Zelensky’s likely appointee.
“There is no doubt that this appointment was the correct decision,” says Oleh Zhdanov, a retired General Staff colonel. “We do not yet know if Zagorodnyuk’s tenure will be fruitful. But the very principle — a civilian manager in charge of a policymaking and resource-managing ministry — is a step in the right direction toward Western standards. It is like turning a new page, an attempt to make a step away from the Soviet model that was, in fact, reinstated under (President Petro) Poroshenko.”
Transform the command
Both Zelensky and Zagorodnyuk have so far offered only very general plans for the defense sector, stressing continued military buildup in accordance with NATO benchmarks, improving social care for personnel, and combating corruption.
But the challenging part is that Zagorodnyuk’s ministry will have to successfully complete one of key tasks of the 2020 reform: Introducing the position of Chief Commander (not to be confused with Commander-in-Chief, i. e. the president), the top military officer leading the entire Armed Forces and answering to the civilian defense minister.
In addition to that, the General Staff must be transformed into a body that carries out military policies and decisions defined by the Chief Commander. The Joint Operative Command — a combined staff uniting all five branches of the military service: Ground, Air, Naval, Airborne, and Special Operations Forces — would be charged with the direct use of troops in battle.
Above all, the civilian-led Defense Ministry is supposed to ensure civilian oversight of the military, manage resources for the Armed Forces, and also assume strategic decision-making in defense.
According to Deputy Chief of General Staff Ihor Kolesnyk, this system, generally common for NATO militaries, must be successfully introduced in Ukraine by the end of 2019.
Newly-appointed Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk addresses the Verkhovna Rada on Aug. 29, 2019. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
J-structure
That’s not the ministry’s biggest headache. It also must complete the process of switching the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the so-called continental staff system: a standardized function structure of military staffs that is common for NATO countries.
Thus, the Ukrainian top command must assume a structure similar to SHAPE, NATO’s joint military headquarters for Europe, consisting of nine functional J-elements (where J stands for “joint”): J‑1 (personnel), J‑2 (intelligence), J‑3 (military operations), J‑4 (logistics), J‑5 (planning), J‑6 (communications), J‑7 (troop training), J‑8 (resource management), and J‑9 (civil-military affairs).
The new structure would not only make the Ukrainian military command fully compatible with NATO (which is one of the reform’s primary goals), but also hopefully put an end to the Soviet-style chaos in which the General Staff and Ministry of Defense have overlapping responsibilities.
This has undermined the Armed Forces’ effectiveness for decades.
The new NATO-style mechanism is also expected save military personnel from overwhelming bureaucracy and heaps of senseless paperwork that had led soldiers to joke about the “Ukrainian Paper Army,” a play on the World War II-era “Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” which has the same acronym in Ukrainian.
Although introducing the J-structure has seen some progress over past years, the deadline — the end of 2020 — is quite near.
Belated bills
A range of crucial legislative initiatives, bitterly neglected for years, should also be of key priority. Zagorodnyuk now has many things to discuss with parliament.
One of the bills long languishing in parliament proposes launching a brand new hierarchy of military ranks. It envisages the creation of the so-called sergeant corps, similar to the institution of non-commissioned officers in the United States military.
This reform is aimed at completely reshaping the Ukrainian military according to the American model, where commissioned officers make decisions while their sergeants implement their commands and take care of their subordinate soldiers in the unit. This system would extend to all levels of the military, from the smallest unit, a section, to squads, companies, battalions, and so on.
A list of proposed military ranks for Ukraine’s Armed Forces under a bill failed in the Verkhovna Rada on Feb. 26. (Illia Ponomarenko/Kyiv Post)
Since 2017, this key reform has seen little support. The previous Verkhovna Rada simply ignored it and failed to pass several bills on the matter.
The same fate awaited another key bill that would have introduced numerous amendments and improvements to Ukrainian military service regulations, which grew Soviet instructions of the 1970s. The bill would also have synchronized them with NATO benchmarks.
While Zagorodnyuk must now do his best to urge Servant of the People — the majority faction in parliament — to finally pass these key bills, he is also facing another difficult challenge: building a balanced system of payments for Ukrainian officers and sergeants. In this new system, officers and sergeants at the same levels of command should receive equal wages as parallel specialists. They are not a chief and a subordinate, like in the Soviet system.
And because Zagorodnyuk supports transparency and combatting corruption in defense, he and the entire Cabinet of Ministers should immediately initiate bills on removing the cloak of excessive secrecy from state defense procurement. This has bred immense corruption risks for decades and was never even touched upon by the Poroshenko Administration.
