Andriy Zagorodnyuk does not have a military background, yet he has been leading the reform office at Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense since March 2015.
Zagorodnyuk, 39, is an entrepreneur at heart. Given the success of his company, Discovery Drilling Equipment, in the oilfield services industry, his post at the ministry may seem even more unlikely.
“I could have had an investor or entrepreneur visa to any country I wanted,” he told the Kyiv Post in a Nov. 10 interview. “I had all the options for a U.S. green card or British citizenship. It wasn’t a problem.”
But Zagorodnyuk, who was born and raised in Kyiv, did not take any of those options. He holds only a Ukrainian passport. In the spring of 2014, when Russia launched its war in eastern Ukraine, he came to the aid of his country. Initially, he sent clothes and food to servicemen at the front.
His company would go on to produce armour for military vehicles and heaters for soldiers’ barracks.
“We were the largest charitable provider of heaters in the warzone. We heated, probably, 10,000 people,” Zagorodnyuk said. “But that was all just filling in some gaps. It didn’t make much sense from a long-term perspective.”
The entrepreneur’s chance to make a more lasting contribution soon came. At the beginning of 2015 he was approached by volunteers working at the Ministry of Defense. They suggested he join them, and help try to reform the armed forces.
“I had good experience in the commercial sector managing change from Soviet standards to international standards. And so basically I was, like, okay, maybe my change management experience would help. But I didn’t know it would get me here for this long and that my involvement would be so serious.”
Time for change
Ukraine’s military is currently in the middle of a major effort to modernize in line with NATO standards.
The realization of the need for deep reforms came a little over two-and-a-half years ago when Kremlin-backed fighters took over parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts. At that time, the Ukrainian army was under-equipped, underfunded and undermanned.
It suffered a devastating loss of more than 300 men at the city of Ilovaisk in August 2014, when Russian soldiers came across the border and ambushed retreating Ukrainian soldiers.
The debacle led to the first peace agreement in Minsk, Belarus, an agreement that was soon supplanted by a second one in February 2015, after battlefield losses in Debaltseve and the Donetsk airport.
What saved the country from complete collapse, says Zagorodnyuk, was the incredible effort made by volunteers, both in battalions on the frontline and in the rear.
“It’s officially recognized by NATO and the government that volunteers built a life-support alternative logistical system in 2014, which basically was one of the reasons why Ukraine survived,” he said.
“It’s was amazing and completely unexpected for the enemy. All their calculations about our capabilities were neutralized.They couldn’t predict the volunteering. That was partly what saved the country. But then it was absolutely clear that the army needs to be ready for reform. So the whole understanding of the need for reform is coming from the fact that we almost lost our country.”
But even after the horror of Ilovaisk, change did not come quickly.
Zagorodnyuk told the Kyiv Post the defense minister in office during those events, Valeriy Heletey, was resistant to new ideas and that the man who took over from him and who remains in the post today, Stepan Poltarak, is “probably a better minister than any other we’ve had.”
It was under Poltarak, in September 2015, that the Ministry of Defense officially announced the launch of the reform office with Zagorodnyuk at the helm.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk. (Courtesy). (www.photohouse.com.ua +38(067)50)
Where to go from here?
Ukraine’s plan to upgrade its armed forces is outlined in a 25-page document, known as the Strategic Defense Bulletin, which was signed into law by President Petro Poroshenko last summer.
It was drafted by Ukrainian officials with significant input from experts from the U.S., Britain and other NATO countries. Such international collaboration on a piece of national legislation was unprecedented in Ukrainian history and it did not always progress smoothly.
But in spite of all the hardship, it was a process well worth going through because now everyone involved with the armed forces is working toward common goals, says Zagorodnyuk.
“It was quite a painful process,” he told the Kyiv Post.
“It was rewritten several times, it went back and forth. But now we all have an understanding of where we should go. Before, there were millions of other options and many people refused to do anything because they were saying, ‘if we don’t know where we’re going, why should we bother?”
If all goes to plan, Ukraine should reach NATO standards by 2020. But whether that target will be reached is very much a matter for debate.
As Deputy Defense Minister Ihor Dolhov told the Kyiv Post in a recent interview, the country’s “to-do list” stretches to some 600 points.
The scope of work to be done in each area varies but, according to Zagorodnyuk, “very often we are talking about the complete reinvention of the process.”
He points to battlefield first aid as one example of how Ukraine’s failure to adhere to universally-recognized practices as having real consequences.
“On the frontline you have to be able to give a soldier first aid within 10 minutes and within one hour of an injury he should be able to get professional medical help. On the battlefield 90 percent of people die within one hour of being wounded and most of them die within the first 10 minutes if they don’t get help.
You need paramedics, battalion aid stations and field hospitals. That’s what helps to save the lives of a huge number of people. In Ukraine, none of that has been in place.”
In fact, Ukraine has already made improvements. In the past 18 months, its standing army has grown from 150,000 soldiers to 250,000 and defense spending in 2016 is up to $4 billion, targeted at 5 percent of gross national product.
However, Russia, with three times the population and 10 times the GDP, dwarfs Ukraine’s effort. It has 800,000 active military personnel and spent around $65 billion on its armed forces in 2015.
While Ukraine’s numbers may seem small, Zagorodnyuk says the progress should be assessed relative to the state of Ukraine’s defenses prior to the start of the war in the Donbas.
“The army of Ukraine did not plan to be in a war. Our doctrine didn’t include that we had enemies. No one planned for a war on our territory. The infrastructure wasn’t ready for that at all.”
The reforms office chief also believes the relatively depleted state of the military prior to 2014 was the result of a deliberate plan carried out during the time of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
“This should be understood clearly. The Ukrainian army, in the last five years specifically, was on purpose destroyed and its capabilities were decreased so that it would be completely redundant…I don’t have documentary proof but it is a commonly-held opinion because it was done with such persistence and such planning.”
Zagorodnyuk says the reason why such a situation was able to take root is because Ukraine has suffered over the years from a lack of civilian control over the military.
Such oversight is a key part of the NATO philosophy. Developing a system of civilian, democratic control over the armed forces is now a major part of the work of the reforms office.
“The civilian population didn’t notice that the army had suddenly lost its capabilities,” Zagorodnyuk told the Kyiv Post.
“So we need to rebuild it. One of our long-term goals is to design how we are going to build up that civilian control. That’s very, very important. In the long-term that is the most important thing.”
Still fighting for better
Zagorodnyuk is hopeful Ukraine’s armed forces are on the cusp of making a decisive break with the past.
But he admits his office still faces regular attempts to derail, delay or otherwise block its reforms. Such was the case with a number of pilot projects launched in 2015 which sought to tackle issues across procurement, IT, logistics and medicine.
“What happened, unfortunately, was that most of the projects this year were stopped. That’s amazing to hear, I know. We opened up so many different pilot areas. Most of them were already at some stage of realization and working,” he said.
“This year, we had a huge backfire from the system. Bureaucratic, probably corrupt. It was coming from inside the system…you can only guess. We’re not an investigative authority, we can’t do investigations to find out what’s going on. 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. I could write a book on how to sabotage change, how to stop change from happening.”
In spite of such setbacks, the 39-year-old is still optimistic.He says he genuinely believes that at the highest levels of politics the will for change exists.
He contrasts his view of Ukraine now with how he felt after the 2004 Orange Revolution, which blocked a rigged election in favor of Viktor Yanukovych and ended with the democratic election of Viktor Yushchenko.
In the years which followed those demonstrations, he says life only became more difficult and he and many of his friends were “extremely disappointed in Ukraine as a country.”
But as they contemplated seeking a future in another part of the world, the Euromaidan Revolution erupted in the winter of 2013 in the Ukrainian capital, providing a new source of inspiration.
“My first reaction to Maidan was a huge sense of surprise that there is actually a huge amount of people who are unsatisfied and they are not talking about leaving they are talking about changing the country. And they are going to do this themselves.”
Back to the future
Zagorodnyuk told the Kyiv Post he expects to see ‘massive improvements’ in implementing reforms in the next few months.
That comes in contrast to the situation at the reforms office earlier this year, when disillusionment was running high and a number of staff members quit over the lack of progress.
“Two months ago, I don’t know if I would even have been talking,” said Zagorodnyuk, “because we decided to step away from public communication because we couldn’t say anything good.”
If there is cause for hope, it comes partially in the form of the Defense Reform Advisory Board.
Established earlier this month and comprised of high level military experts drawn from all over the world, it will offer consulting and advice to Ukraine on how the country should modernize its armed forces.
Zagorodnyuk says the board’s support for reforms is likely to be invaluable when it comes to convincing the Ministry of Defense of the need for change.
Ultimately, the goal remains the attainment of NATO standards by 2020.
Does Zagorodnyuk intend to stay at the reform office until then?
“We’ll see,” he says. “Let’s put it this way: so far, we’re all working on achieving closer goals. And one of those goals is to understand how we’re going to get to 2020. We’re obviously working on this. We take it and we move with it. That’s it. There’s no other option.”
