Last month, during a phone call with NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, President Volodymyr Zelensky assured the commitment of the Ukrainian government and our political force to join NATO and receive the Membership Action Plan, a priority for the 245-member Servant of People faction in parliament.
From day one, as the head of the Subcommittee on the Implementation of NATO Values and Standards, I have been working on the approximation of Ukraine to NATO membership. One of the biggest milestones on this way is the reform of the Security Service of Ukraine, known better as the SBU, a powerful law enforcement agency with 40,000 employees and which traces its ancestry to the Soviet KGB.
On Jan. 28, parliament made the first step towards reform by adopting the respective law in the first reading. Now our task is to adopt a good law which launches real SBU reform.
The current law on the SBU was adopted almost 30 years ago. It was not progressive even back in 1992, so in 2021 it сan not keep up with modern challenges like growing cybersecurity threats or Russian hybrid warfare against Ukraine.
Starting, from 2014 there were lots of talks about the reform, but we achieved real parliamentarian work on the issue only seven years later. We desperately need to modernize our security service to make it stronger and reinforce its capacity to address modern threats. As we aspire to become a NATO member the new reformed SBU should become a reliable partner for its counterparts in other NATO countries.
In April 2020, I was entrusted with the position of the head of the working group on the draft law on the SBU reform. It was a challenging task, but with the support of the president, we managed to move the process forward. Parliament supported it in the first reading in January. It means that parliament has supported the concept, the overall structure of the future transformation, and the main ideas of the reform. Still, a lot has to be done to make the real reform and implement NATO standards into the work of the service.
Now, the task of parliament is to adopt the best law possible. We cannot afford to waste time on another round of deliberations on the reform. SBU reform is not a single law, but rather an entire package of 40 different laws and regulations on security. However, the core law on the SBU plays a pivotal role in the process. It lays out the new architecture of the Ukrainian secret service.
We want to clearly determine that the priority areas for the SBU should be exclusively countering intelligence and subversive activities, the fight against terrorism, protection of national statehood, and upholding the constitutional order. Everything else should be abandoned, including tackling organized internal crimes, economic crimes, the fight against corruption, etc. The SBU’s jurisdiction should be limited to crimes against national security, terrorism, peace, and international law.
There should not be direct investigative functions within the service. That will deprive the Service of undue pressure on business by opening/ closing cases, and providing the SBU with new special service tools to respond to the threats to national security. The focus of work of the service should not be on private entrepreneurs and business representatives, but on the secret agents, civil servants, representatives of branches of government, and the existing clans of judges and prosecutors – all of those who determine public policy, influence the state affairs, have access to sensitive government data and may become targets of Russian intelligence operations, etc.
Needless to say, there is a lot of resistance to this work because we are dealing with a system that has not been transformed in any way for many years. It is even harder to transform the old than to create the brand new, to change the warfare instrument while having warfare.
This transformation is needed not only for national security or Euro-Atlantic integration. Far more, it is for our common security. Because a modern and reliable Ukrainian security service means a safer and better-trusted Euro-Atlantic environment, remembering that Ukraine is on the frontier now of the European border.
Mariana Bezuhla is a member of parliament who serves as deputy head of the Committee on National Security and Defense.
