November 13, 2019

May Ukrainian army adopt NATO standards painlessly?

topic:	Humans
located:	Russia, Ukraine
editor:	Igor Serebryany

The Ukraine plans to cancel the conscription, switch to a fully contracted army under NATO standards, the country's Defense Minister Andrei Zagorodnyuk said on Monday.

The process of dropping conscription will take about a year, he said. The minister did not specify the deadline for reaching unification with NATO but said it has been "an ultimate goal".

Currently, Ukrainian conscripts serve 12 to 18 months depending on their education level.

Those plans are reasonable enough, head of the Center for Political Studies and Conflictology in Kiev Mikhail Pogrebinsky believes.

"Transferring to the professional army has been obvious in Ukraine in recent years. The number of conscripts has been dropping steadily. Ending the conscription type of army has been a long-term strategy of the Defense Ministry, so the terms of this strategy finalization must be well-calculated", he says.

Under Ukraine's Constitution, "protection of Homeland, its independence and territorial integrity" is a duty of all its citizens aged 20-27.

"Dropping conscription would heal a headache of twice-a-year 'hunting' for conscripts who try to escape army service by all ways imaginable because this country has effectively been at war", Pogrebinsky says.

The Defense Ministry plans to substitute the conscripts with servicepeople on contract because the law requires a conscript to reach 20 years while a contract soldier can apply for army service starting from 18.

Unification with the NATO standards is a more demanding task, still it is executable too, the expert goes on.

"All East European countries completed that task rather quickly and painlessly. Nearly all of them joined NATO. Though Ukraine is bigger in population and territory than most of them, that shouldn't be an obstacle for our armed forces to follow the suit", he predicts.
European choice has been Kiev's official doctrine for decades, and the country's armed forces have been trying to approach NATO standards since 2015 when first NATO's military instructors arrived to Ukraine.

"Sooner or later, the Ukrainian army will be one of NATO's in essence if not by status", Pogrebinsky assures.

Still, unification with the Western military standards is not granted for Ukraine due to a shortage of time and money, a member of Russia's Security Council Andrei Manoilo cautions.

"What is a NATO-standardized army? It means any given unit must be ready to dispatch on alert to any location where NATO forces are deployed and relieve them on a very short notice, without any extra training. To standardize a national army with the NATO requirements will take tons of time", he says.

For Ukraine, it may take as long as 20 years, Manoilo predicts.

"First, all Soviet-made hardware must be replaced with NATO's one. Money is not the only problem. Rearmament means that during some prolonged period Soviet and NATO military equipment will coexist within one army. That will create a peculiar situation when some units live under old Soviet combat regulations while the others will use new NATO manuals", he says.

In effect, that would require coexistence of two separate Defense Ministries during a transitional period. That would be highly dangerous for the army engaged in an armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine.

"I don't rule out that Ukraine as a state just lacks those 20 years required to become a NATO country", Manoilo doubts.