The fact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea and subsequent war in the Donbas in 2014 came when Ukraine’s declining army was in a pitiable state, is hardly a surprising news.
However, according to a new official inquiry, the scale of decay of the Armed Forces over more than two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was even more horrifying than many had realized.
According to Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, by the beginning of the war, the army of Ukraine had practically ceased to exist as an organized and commanded force.
The official’s address, presented late on Feb. 4 to the Verkhovna Rada’s temporary commission on embezzlement, shows that decades of large-scale plundering, poor leadership, and ultimately failed modernization and reforms led the army to being almost totally paralyzed, disorganized, and combat-ineffective in the face of the existential threat to the nation in 2014.
The newly presented study showed how the army’s chains of command at all levels had been being painstakingly dismantled for years, and its very military power broken up and sold off for next to nothing.
By late 1991, when Ukraine finally declared its independence, Ukraine had inherited a more than impressive military potential from the just-collapsed Soviet Union. According to Lutsenko, the newly-created nation had a strategic force subdivided into three military districts that included:
- 3 combined-arms armies
- 2 armored armies
- 4 air fleets
- 1 air defense army
- 1 missile army
- the Black Sea Fleet
- 2 missile defense nodes
In general, the force included over 800,000 personnel, 6,500 tanks, 7,000 armored vehicles, 2,000 airplanes, and 250 warships. Moreover, Ukraine at that time was the world’s third largest nuclear power after the United States and Russia, with 1,272 nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2,500 tactical nuclear units, and 44 Tupolev strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
The country’s strategic nuclear force was represented by 5 divisions of the former Soviet 43rd Missile Army.
“From the perspective of most of the military experts, this potential was sufficient to create a powerful national Armed Forces,” Lutsenko said.
“The disposal of excess assets, weapons, and hardware, was enough to raise sufficient funds to modernize the Ukrainian Armed Forces. International practice and military science show that at a certain time, the optimal manpower strength of the armed forces should be approaching 1 percent of a nation’s total population.”
A Ukrainian soldier fires a machine gun during a night-time combat clash with Russia-backed separatists uptown of Avdiyivka, Donetsk Oblast on Sept. 13, 2018. (AFP)
“However, immediately after 1991 and several years after, when Ukraine’s authorities started gaining control over the Armed Forces and military hardware from Soviet depots, there was a reckless reduction of the army in Ukraine.”
The official inquiry divided the period of the army’s disintegration between 1991 and 2014 into four distinct stages.
First, between 1991 and 1996, the country’s leadership initiated the gradual reduction of Soviet armaments, and therefore paved the way for the systematic decrease of the combat potential of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
Another heavy blow to the country’s military power was nuclear disarmament, accomplished by 1996 under security assurances from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, under the ill-fated Budapest Memorandum of 1994.
The cuts proceeded through 1997-2005, with further attempts to introduce a new effective command and control system for the Armed Forces and continuing the “groundless and reckless” troop reductions, which in turn triggered a systematic decrease in their combat potential.
In February 2018, the Prosecutor General’s Office also asserted that between 2005 and 2014, as many as 832 tanks, 232 helicopters, 202 warplanes, 714 armored vehicles, 4,930 cars, 28,555 artillery and rocket projectiles, and 1.82 million firearms were sold off, in addition to various munitions valued at Hr 560 million ($20.6 million).
Ever more Ukrainian weapons were sold off before 2005, but, as the the Prosecutor General’s Office said, all papers regarding this have either been destroyed or lost.
The rapid decay accelerated during the administration of President Viktor Yushenko, and by the time his pro-Russian rival Viktor Yanukvych came to power in 2010, the Armed Forces entered their darkest period, according to Lutsenko.
The new period started with the Yanukovych administration, including then-Defense Minister Mykhailo Yezhel and Chief of Staff Hryhoriy Pedchenko “completely ignoring the basic principles of generalship, as well as the experience previously gained in reforming the Armed Forces.”
Under their leadership, the cuts and disarmament evolved into the outright dissolution of the nation’s operative strategic military command and supporting forces.
“(As result of that), the Armed Forces were stripped of a command center able to direct inter-echelon communication between troops, to organize their training, to plan operations… and to successfully accomplish them,” Lutsenko said.
The official inquiry said that due to the Yanukovych-era cuts, the mobility of Ukrainian combat formations by 2014 had been “completely paralyzed” at the operative-strategic and operative levels.
The so-called “Anti-Terror Operation headquarters,” which was hastily created in 2014 by the General Staff to command troops in the war zone in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, was a substitute for the Operative Command East, which had been annulled in 2010.
Furthermore, by 2012, the nation’s air defense network was “completely disorganized,” and the general troop-control system was “critically misbalanced” in overt violation of both Ukrainian legislation and military theory.
A Ukrainian soldier through the ruins of industrial zone uptown of Avdiyivka on Sept. 13, 2018. (AFP)
The whole armed forces were divided into three almost totally independent headquarters formed on a local basis, and practically unresponsive to the central command in Kyiv. This dissolution of the united direct command chain triggered immense chaos that paralyzed the Ukrainian troops in the Donbas during Russia’s invasion in early 2014.
In 2013-2014, the whole chain of command at all levels from brigades to top command of the branches of service, apart from in the Air Force, were completely disorganized, and army corps as basic structural units of the Armed Forces at the operative-tactical level had been effectively disbanded.
Lastly, as Lutsenko added, during the last years before Russia launched its war on Ukraine, then-President Yanukovych was repeatedly warmed by the Ministry of Defense and Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service about increasing Russian military power gathering near Ukraine’s borders and about the potential threat of the invasion of Crimea.
But in spite of that, he neglected his constitutional obligations as the Commander-in-Chief and failed to take any steps regarding the danger, which eventually paved the way for vast territorial loses in Crimea and the Donbas, Lutsenko added.
Indeed, in the early battles of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in spring 2014, which followed the infamous withdrawal of the remaining Ukrainian forces from Russian-occupied Crimea, the Ukrainian troops fighting Russian-led forces were often poorly armed and equipped.
As demonstrated by records from an emergency meeting of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council dated Feb. 28, 2014, Ukraine’s disorganized military command by that time could only deploy up to 6,000 reserve troops to help repel the Russian invasion.
The extreme lack of manpower and supplies amid the gathering storm of a general war with Russia in 2014 gave birth to numerous volunteer battalions formed by the pubic to join in the fighting, as well as to a nationwide civilian effort to help collect supplies and equipment for soldiers.
But while the Kremlin was waging its proxy war, Ukraine, however, managed to somewhat improve the situation in its Armed Forces. After nearly five years of record-high defense spending, surpassing 5 percent of the nation’s GDP (Hr 212 billion or $7.8 billion in 2019) and massive rearmament and NATO-style reform programs, Ukraine’s Armed Forces now include nearly 250,000 troops and 158,000 trained reserve personnel.
Ukrainian soldiers march in front of an armored column during an Independence Day parade rehearsal in central Kyiv on Aug. 20, 2018. (Volodymyr Petrov)
As part of the reform, the army has restored its four interlinked strategic territorial commands, which defend the county’s entire territory in all domains using all branches of service, and also created a united Joint Operative Headquarters in charge of all forces in the war zone of Donbas.
Since 2016, the Armed Forces have followed a comprehensive program to achieve full inter-compatibility with NATO armies by late 2020. The fast-track rearming is spearheaded with foreign assistance, mainly from the United States, which has provided over $1 billion in defense aid, including lethal weapons, as well as with regular exercises and training with alliance forces.
Nonetheless, despite the massive investments in ground forces, even as they remain engaged in trench warfare in the Donbas, Ukraine is still extremely weak in the air and at sea, with the naval and air branches of the armed forces barely benefiting from the skyrocketing military spending.
Besides, the Armed Forces are still heavily criticized for breeding bureaucracy, their poor social protection of personnel, and their ineffective Soviet-style leadership due to which thousands of war-hardened contracted servicemen are constantly leaving for civilian life.
