Yet another scandal has erupted in Ukraine’s military, raising questions regarding the discipline of everyday service among troops, as well as the competence of leadership and its truthfulness before the Ukrainian society.
New findings in the case of the Ukrainian serviceman Yevhen Dobrynskiy, who was arrested by Russia’s FSB security service on May 30, suggests that the Ukrainian military offered untruthful information on the incident’s circumstances.
Dobrynskiy, born in 1992, a senior soldier with the 13th Battalion, 95th Air Assault Brigade, one of Ukraine’s elite airborne formations, went missing on May 30 at 5 a.m. local time at a military checkpoint at the administrative border with Russian-occupied Crimea, nearly 1 kilometer away from a section controlled by the Russian forces.
According to Ukraine’s military police, the soldier was not answering phone calls, while immediate attempts to establish his whereabouts resulted in nothing.
“Upon preliminary information, the serviceperson was abducted while on duty,” the service said on May 30.
“Signs of struggle against unknown persons were detected near the observation post.”
Interrogated
It became known that Dobrynskiy’s unit guards a railroad bridge over the Sivash Lake between the mainland and Crimea.
Later, the airborne forces command added that personnel deployed to the sector had operated firearms, munitions, and radio communication devices, while observation posts were manned by several troops. Moreover, according to the May 31 statement, the missing soldier’s personal firearm and armor were kept available at the military installation.
On June 2, however, Russia’s FSB security service reported that Dobrynskiy had been arrested while crossing the border with occupied Crimea in a drunken state with no identification documents on himself. Besides, according to FSB, Dobrynskiy was carrying an alleged narcotic substance, which was expropriated from him.
Russian occupation authorities initiated a criminal case against the Ukrainian soldier over his “violation of the Russian state border. Besides, the Russian media in Crimea published an interrogation video, in which Dobrynskiy asserts that on May 29, between 10 and 11 p.m. local time, he came to the nearby railroad station of Sivash to buy cigarettes, where he met a group of locals drinking alcohol.
“They called me,” he says. “And I came to them and started drinking and smoking marijuana with them. They gave me some more (marijuana), and I put it in my pocket.” After that, severely drunk Dobrynskiy allegedly headed across the border with occupied Crimea in the early hours of May 30, where he was arrested by Russian forces.
Moreover, another video allegedly made by FSB surveillance cameras in the incident’s zone show a person in Ukrainian military uniform, reportedly Dobrynskiy, stumbling along a railroad track with his arms over his head and then getting arrested by Russian operatives.
Shortly following the publication, the Ukrainian airborne command decried it as a fake staged by the FSB. According to the military, some details seen in the video prove it false.
“The main headwear in the given military formation is a summer boonie hat rather than the field forage cap put on the serviceperson,” the statement reads. “Also, (the FSB) did not take into account the time of the day and weather conditions amid which the serviceperson “disappeared, notably 4.30 a.m.”
Besides, the military noted that FSB published the video only three days after Dobrynskiy’s arrest. In their opinion, this period of time was used by Russian operatives to get the Ukrainian soldier brainwashed for interrogation.
“The young man looks upset on the video,” the military stated.
“He is reading a prepared text. It can be possible that he is under the influence of special (psychoactive) drugs.”
The military did not offer their assumptions regarding any reasons behind the alleged abduction of a minor-rank serviceperson and the subsequent three-day-long forging of circumstances.
The airborne command also added that it was doing everything possible to bring the soldier home.
The ugly truth
However, the latest statements on the case were met with severe criticism among the near-military community in Ukraine. The military command is particularly accused of trying to weasel out of the uncomfortable situation that once again indicated an extremely low level of discipline and morale in military formations, as well as of the organization of service.
“In the army, alcohol abuse and drugs are still a grave disaster in numerous military formations,” said journalist Yuriy Butusov, who covers the military, on early on June 3.
“The quality of human resources, even in elite air assault forces, is in fact not high. And this is a problem of most of our military formations. Poorly motivated (unemployed people joining the military only for the sake of more or less stable and decent wages) are recruited only out of the need to fill dire shortages of personnel… Therefore, all sorts of people are admitted.”
Meanwhile, he added, motivated, responsible and career-minded soldiers and officers continued leaving the ranks because of Soviet-style disorder and degeneracy, bravado, and imitation of service.
“It should be understood that the lack of reforms in the army is the responsibility of commanders and politicians as well,” the journalist said, adding that the Ukrainian military needs a fresh start, in which the quality of military personnel would be more important than the number of troops formally in ranks on paper.
Glen Grant, a retired British Army colonel and former adviser to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, also agrees that the core issue of such a dire situation is the lack of proper leadership in the military.
“Soldiers are soldiers and are not always the most intelligent sensible people in the world,” the officer told the Kyiv Post.
“Their nature is to take risks and sometimes to do stupid things. They grow up and often become good sergeants and even better officers as they understand their own kind well. So it is important for operations to lead them well and to set good rules and to keep them properly engaged and busy off duty with sport and other activities so they do not do stupid things.”
But the Dobrynskiy case shows that the soldier was not in a good environment and was not being well-led.
“Soldiers who are unhappy either leave or if they cannot they turn to drink and maybe drugs,” Grant said.
“What happened to this soldier is a symptom, not a cause. We need to understand the cause and fix it. The very strange stories coming out of the Ministry of Defense and the military only show that they have learned nothing in 6 years and that they think they can fool the public by nonsense. Truth is what we need now, even if it hurts, more than ever. Remember Napoleon’s dictum, ‘there are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.”
