The Military-Industrial Complex:

Ukrainian society and industry are becoming more martial due to the conflict with Russia.

For one, Ukraine has embarked on a piecemeal reconstitution of its military-industrial complex. This revival has, however, been fraught with accusations of corruption and bureaucratic resistance to change.

Ukraine has the legacy industrial infrastructure to be a major arms producer. According to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Ukraine was the world’s ninth-largest arms exporter in the period from 2011 to 2015.

During the Soviet era, Ukraine was an industrial hub for producing weapons and military hardware. The Soviet model, however, required production to be scattered across different Soviet countries, so that no one country was exclusively relied upon to produce vital military hardware.

The Soviet military-industrial complex was a collective effort across the USSR. Today, Ukraine is consequently left with production gaps from the Soviet era.

An example: Antonov, Ukraine’s largest state-owned aircraft producer, had previously relied on parts from Russian suppliers. Due to the war, however, those suppliers have been cut off.

Antonov now produces about three aircraft a year, according to Ukrainian news reports. The company needs to produce about 12 aircraft annually to be profitable.

In a statement published to its website, Ukroboronprom, Ukraine’s nationalized defense production conglomerate, said it was operating at less than half its production capacity due to “underfunding of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, which occurred due to the lack of legislative changes.”

The Ukrainian government allocated 13.5 billion hryvnias (about $500 million) in 2016 to repair, modernize, and produce new weapons for its armed forces.

Ukroboronprom said it received only 32.6 percent of this amount—4.4 billion hryvnias, or about $163 million—from the government. Out of that payment, 1.6 billion hryvnias ($59 million) went to repair military equipment, and 2.8 billion hryvnias ($104 million) to produce new weapons.

Ukrainian society has also adapted to the state of perpetual conflict with Russia.

Across the country, civilians regularly meet on the weekends for military training. They comprise a network of partisan forces called territorial defense battalions.

These civilian volunteer paramilitary units, which can be rapidly mobilized to defend against a Russian invasion, are not official military units. But they receive training, equipment, and in some cases, arms from the regular military.

This grassroots defense mindset—a throwback to partisan groups in World War II—promises a protracted guerrilla conflict should Russia ever invade Ukraine.

“When Putin encounters the possibility of fighting territorial defense battalions, militias, or even students, it acts as a deterrent,” Serhiy Yanchuk, an associate professor at Taras Shevchenko National University, told The Daily Signal in an earlier interview.

Yanchuk is coordinator of the university’s Students Guard, a volunteer militia comprising students and faculty.

NATO Standards:

Ukraine’s military is in the process of a top-to-bottom overhaul to bring it in line with NATO standards by 2020.

Even the colors of symbols denoting friendly versus enemy forces on military maps have been flipped to match NATO maps. (Friendly forces were marked red and the enemy was blue on Soviet military maps, a color arrangement still used by Russia.)

In 2015, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense launched a special reform office, spearheaded by 39-year-old businessman Andriy Zagorodnyuk.

Ukrainian news reports have documented the bureaucratic headwinds Zagorodnyuk has faced while trying to reform the military.

“This year, we had a huge bureaucratic backfire from the system,” Zagorodnyuk told the English-language Kyiv Post newspaper in November. “Bureaucratic, probably corrupt. … Very rarely someone tells you to your face that he wants to keep things the old way. Usually people come up with a million different excuses.”

On May 20, Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, signed into law a comprehensive military reform plan called the Strategic Defense Bulletin.

The document calls for a total revamp of Ukraine’s military doctrine, training, and operations to ultimately achieve the “criteria necessary for the full membership in NATO.”

It also singles out Russia as Ukraine’s No. 1 national security threat.

Ukraine is not vying for regional influence over Russia. Rather, many Ukrainian soldiers and politicians say the current conflict is for Ukraine’s independence from Moscow.

Yet, tensions are inflamed to such a degree between Ukraine and Russia that there is scant leeway to absorb the shock of an unexpected event without it leading to total war.

“Ukraine is mobilizing around another idea—the idea of a political nation, that would one day find its place in European political, economic, and security structure,” Plokhy, the Harvard University professor, said.

Plokhy added: “It is not only a state-political divorce, as it was in 1991. It is a mental, psychological breakup of Ukrainians and Russians.”

This first appeared in The Daily Signal here. 

Image Credit: Creative Commons/Flickr.