Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov pledges to hold a comprehensive re-assessment of the personnel employed within the system of internal affairs agencies.
“I expect that, six months later on, I will be able to tell my country that the police have been reformed. Why can’t I say this right now? Because as of the start of last year, we had have around 180,000 staff employed with our police forces. Do we know how this situation can be changed? Where should we go to find these human resources?” Avakov said at a press conference in Kyiv on Dec. 9.
After the structural changes were made, the newly created interior ministry institutions started implementing another “round, the most painful one”, Avakov said.
“Since the start of the year, 47,000 have been fired from internal affairs agencies, including on non-exculpatory grounds. Where can we find skilled and prepared guys who have a new ideology? This is the task, and this is the route that we must take,” he said.
Avakov recalled that the system of re-assessing the entire staff at his ministry had been announced and launched some time ago.
“Our re-assessment that we are initiating and holding here in Kyiv and the Kyiv region is not formalistic. For the time being, 12,000 policemen have been re-assessed. Each of them has passed two tests: one test is General Skills and the other is a professional one. And now each of the policemen is preparing for an interview,” he said.
More than one-third of the test participants showed some very low results which are inconsistent with any further service, the interior minister revealed.
“We lost another 30 percent of the personnel in the most prepared “Kyiv field” alone, Avakov complained.
