The new, long-awaited national security law brings positive change to Ukraine’s defense sector but still fails to fix several significant flaws.
The parliament passed the new law “On National Security” on June 21. It got 248 votes, while the required minimum is 226 votes.
President Petro Poroshenko proposed the law to update outdated defense legislation and make changes necessary to bring the country closer to NATO, Ukraine’s key partner.
Poroshenko, who said in March that Ukraine would join NATO within 10 years, praised the passage of the security bill.
“It’s a key step for our European and Euro-Atlantic integration,” Poroshenko said in a statement. “When we implement this law, the Ukrainian army and the whole defense sector will fully satisfy the criteria for becoming a member of NATO.”
NATO is yet to comment on Ukraine’s new security law.
In Ukraine, the law received mixed reaction. While most agreed it brings positive changes overall, some lawmakers and defense experts pointed out that also falls short in several important areas.
International and domestic experts from the NATO Liaison Office Ukraine, the European Union Advisory Mission, United States Office of Defense Cooperation, and other organizations helped develop the law.
“It’s a framework that sets up the general architecture of the whole defense and security sector,” Viktor Plakhuta, a defense expert with Reanimation Package of Reforms and former head of the defense committee in the economy ministry, wrote in an op-ed for Liga.net news website, reacting to the adoption of the law.
“It clearly defines the roles, responsibilities, and powers of all the participants of the sector.”
Secrecy stays
However, the new law fails to bring transparency to defense sector procurement. Currently, the purchases of key defense supplies, like weapons and armed vehicles, are classified. That means that a large part of the country’s enormous defense budget of $6.1 billion in 2018, or more than 6 percent of gross domestic product, is spent in full secrecy.
Media reports based on occasional leaks have suggested there is rampant corruption in the sector, with prices being inflated and offshore intermediaries being used for defense purchases.
But the national security bill merely brushes on the issue: It declares the need for “the full disclosure of all financial information” in the defense sector, but doesn’t elaborate on it. Currently, the secrecy of defense procurement is backed by the laws “On State Secrets” and “On State Procurement” which exclude defense procurement from the regular, public procedure. The bill on national security envisions no changes to the legislation.
Lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk of the 136-member Poroshenko Bloc said that while the law is a step forward and brings Ukraine closer to NATO, it won’t work if other related laws are not changed.
“Without (amending the other laws) this law may remain a make-believe reform that was passed in the run-up to the NATO summit,” Zalishchuk wrote in her blog for the Ukrainska Pravda news website.
The NATO summit will take place in Brussels on July 11-12, and Poroshenko will attend.
Zalishchuk noted that the transitional provisions listed at the end of the security bill don’t include changing the law on secrecy.
Defense expert Plakhuta also pointed out that the 34-page law has nothing on Ukroboronprom, the secretive state-owned holding of defense production enterprises.
“The most important issues were left out – the military-industrial complex and arms procurement,” Plakhuta wrote.
Civilian control of defense
The new law stipulates that the defense minister must be a civilian. Until now, defense ministers have been army generals.
It also separates the positions of the head of the General Staff and the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Today, Viktor Muzhenko holds both positions. The head of the General Staff will be subordinate to both the civilian defense minister and the president, who maintains overall control of all matters of defense.
And while the law comes in force immediately, several of its articles have a delayed effect. The norm about the civilian defense minister comes in force in 2019, which gives Muzhenko six more months in office.
It also makes changes to the chain of command in the Ukrainian army, bringing it in line with the NATO standards.
SBU untouched
As the law covers all areas of security, it also defines the role of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU.
A highly secretive law enforcement agency, the SBU has come under frequent criticism for allegedly abusing its massive powers to persecute government critics and law-abiding businesses to enrich themselves.
Both domestic anti-corruption activists and foreign partners of Ukraine have called for a reform of SBU that would make the agency more transparent and accountable, and strip it of its powers to fight economic crimes – which it allegedly abuses to solicit money from businesses.
The new law is ambiguous on that. While it takes away the corruption-fighting function of the SBU, which experts celebrated, at the same time it lists “gathering counter-intelligence to protect the economic security of Ukraine” as one of the agency’s functions, which can be interpreted to mean that the service will keep the power to fight white-collar crime.
And it could be a while before anything actually changes within the SBU: The law stipulates that the agency has six months to draft the legislative amendments to bring its work into line with the new security bill. That means the security law and the law that regulates the work of the SBU are in legal conflict.
Independent lawmaker Hanna Hopko offered an amendment to the security bill that would force the SBU reform to start immediately, but parliament failed to support it.
Neither did parliament support a similar amendment by Zalishchuk that sought to immediately remove mentions of economic crime from the law on the SBU.
“We will definitely return to the issue of the SBU reform, and sooner or later stop its brazen interference with Ukraine’s economy,” Hopko wrote after the bill was approved without her amendment.
Overall, defense experts and critical lawmakers referred to the law as a moderate success that was however blemished by its shortcomings.
“This law could have looked good in 2014. Today it looks like a stopgap that’s not sufficient to really bring us closer to NATO,” Zalishchuk wrote.
