WASHINGTON — What kind of security policies should the new government in Ukraine pursue amid pressure to find a way to bring an end to Russia’s war in the eastern Donbas? That was a central question at a conference in the American capital last week.
Entitled “Ukraine’s National Security Doctrine – Divining the Abiding Priorities,” the Oct. 10 conference was the latest in a series of such meetings called “Ukraine’s Quest For Mature Nation Statehood,” which discuss key political, economic and military developments and trends in the country. It was sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council, the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and seven patrons who provided financial assistance.
Volodymyr Zaryckyj, executive director of the Center for U.S.-Ukrainian Relations, explained that “with a new president and a new parliament, we decided we really do need to look at the issue of national security and national security doctrine given we have a new political dynamic in Ukraine.”
Many of the more than 20 speakers, some of them from Ukraine, touched upon President Volodymyr Zelensky’s idea for disengagement along the eastern war front.
Steinmeier Formula threat to Ukraine
Michael Carpenter was a foreign policy adviser to former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, when Biden was the main link between the Ukrainian government and President Barack Obama’s administration. Carpenter also served as deputy assistant secretary of defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans. He is currently senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania and regarded as an authority on Ukraine.
Carpenter said the most dangerous threat to Ukraine currently is the “Steinmeier Formula” being touted by Germany, France and Russia as a way to spark life into the stalled Minsk cease-fire agreement whose conditions Russia has never fulfilled. The formula is named after German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a former foreign minister. Carpenter believes that Steinmeier is trying to force Ukraine to make concessions by withdrawing three key components of the 14 points listed sequentially, as to how they should be implemented, in the Minsk agreement.
The three points concerned the requirement for a cease-fire never followed by Moscow: withdrawal of heavy weaponry, return to Ukrainian control of borders, allowing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Ukraine international monitors to move freely throughout the conflict zone – something the Russian side never permitted.
“Minsk was never a good agreement for Ukraine and was negotiated under the barrel of a gun as Russian troops were bombarding [the Ukrainian town of]Debaltseve,” said Carpenter. “But Ukraine has had to play along and make the best of an agreement that was not in the country’s best interests ……… and was made as the Russians were taking Ukrainian territory and killing Ukrainians.”
Despite dropping the three important requirements, Carpenter said that Steinmeier still urged holding elections and a special status for the occupied territories if they returned to nominal control by Kyiv.
Germany and France were also trying to fudge another crucial precondition for Kyiv that Ukraine should have control of its international borders prior to any elections. Anything else, said Carpenter, compromises Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Carpenter also warned that the formula would force Ukraine into direct negotiations with the Russian proxy “separatist” forces created and controlled by Moscow. That way, he said, the Kremlin hopes to avoid blame for igniting and continuing a conflict that has taken some 13,000 lives and “removes Russia from its responsibility as not only a party to the conflict but the instigator of the war in the Donbas…… that’s a loser for Ukraine.”
He predicts that the local separatist authorities, acting on Moscow’s instructions, would obfuscate and behave in a way to make free elections impossible.
Carpenter said that the Kremlin and its proxies control all the means of information in the occupied territories and the notion that there could be free elections there is “absolutely fantastic and ludicrous.”
But if Ukraine objects, Moscow will pin the blame for the failure to hold elections and make “progress” on Kyiv and he predicted that the “international community” would urge Kyiv to deal with the separatists and might also blame Ukraine for any setbacks.
He called the next “Normandy Format” summit of Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany might be “something of a trap” for Ukraine because while German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emanuel Macron are pressuring Zelensky to go along with the Steinmeier Formula they are not making demands of the aggressor state, Russia, to comply with its Minsk commitments.
“This would be a very dangerous way to go,” said Carpenter who believes Moscow is not interested in genuine give and take talks to find a compromise. “Why would anyone think that Putin would agree to some sort of end-state in the Donbas that is anything less than his desire to fully control Ukraine?”
“I don’t fault president Zelensky for trying [to hold peace talks]. His election mandate was based, in part, on trying to end the war. He can’t be seen as sitting on his hands, he has to do something. But unfortunately, he’s been left hanging in the breeze by the international community.”
To avoid being trapped into concessions that would damage Ukraine’s security and independence, Carpenter said: “President Zelensky has to stake out very clearly what his red lines are ……. so that in the negotiations he can say he’s not going past those red lines. How he plays that in private conversations behind closed doors will be crucial.”
New blood needed In Ukraine’s top military echelons
On Oct. 16, the Ukrainian government angered Moscow by calling for the Kremlin’s puppet entities in Russian-occupied Donbas to be dissolved prior to fresh “Normandy Format” talks.
John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now with the Atlantic Council think tank, referred to the Russian Army ironically as the “Red Army,” the world’s second most powerful military forces.
He hoped that in preparing a new military doctrine Kyiv “will reflect the very good experience the Ukrainian army has accrued in essentially fighting the Kremlin to a standstill.”
He said that Ukraine has, over the last five years of conflict, since Moscow invaded Crimea and the Donbas region, gained considerable experience of fighting the Kremlin in a hybrid war and has been passing on its knowledge to western countries.
Herbst hopes that new blood will come in to replace some of the Soviet-era officers remaining in the upper echelons of the Ukrainian military. The old generals’ ideas, molded by concepts of all-out land war between conventional and nuclear NATO and USSR-led Warsaw Pact forces, was outdated and unsuited to Ukraine’s present situation, he said.
He believes younger – major, captain, and lieutenant level-officers – who have learned from the realities of front line combat, should be “empowered” by Zelensky to take the lead in reshaping Ukraine’s military.
Oleksiy Gridin of the Ukrainian Security Studies Institute said his country’s national security doctrine should change significantly from the current and it was essential for Ukraine to implement several initiatives within the next three years.
These should include overhauling the command and control structure; further developing electronic surveillance methods and counter electronic warfare capabilities; improving Ukraine’s ability to counter Russia’s massive air force and missile superiority; developing drone warfare capacity.
Gridin said that Ukraine can best counter any future aggression by an enemy numerically much stronger by developing a demonstrable capability to inflict a prohibitively large number of fatal casualties on attacking Russian forces.
Political will, military maneuverability, lethality of armaments
Leonid Polyakov from Ukrainian think tank the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, also said Ukraine’s best deterrence would be to show the penalties for any Russian aggression would be severe.
He said: “An independent and democratic Ukraine for imperial chauvinistic Russia will always be an object of aggression. To prevent this, there is no other way than strengthening defense to the level that will allow causing unacceptable losses to the enemy.”
He believes Ukraine is capable of building a military that could unleash enough force “to stop the possible armed assault by the Russian Armed Forces. Or, better, to contain, to prevent, to deter Russians from [launching] armed assault.”
He said a big difference between Ukrainian military discussions now and those prior to the war starting in 2014, is that the Russian invasion showed a previously complacent Ukraine “that it has a real enemy.… This allowed for more realistic threat assessment, better defense planning, more relevant combat training and a triple increase in defense budget.”
“Five years of combat action resulted in tens of thousands of combat-hardened reserve personnel, hundreds of experienced commanding and staff officers, improvement of weapon systems, creation of territorial defense and some other positive things,” he said.
Polyakov emphasized the importance of foreign partners who provide material and advisory support. The U.S. alone supplied Ukraine with some 10,000 different pieces of military equipment, he said.
Ukrainian land forces, said Polyakov, have made great strides since 2014 when only a few thousand were in a battle-worthy condition to confront the Russian invasion.
But he said although they are combat-ready and able to hold the 470-kilometer line of contact in the occupied enclaves, their ability to repel an assault by Russian regular troops supported by Russian aviation, conventional cruise missiles and operational-tactical missiles “is still limited even with major mobilization.”
Ukraine, said Polyakov, must improve its mobilization potential, the maneuverability of its military, the lethality of armaments, intelligence, and their territorial defense forces.
Whether it succeeds in doing that depends on an array of variables including political will, the will of ordinary citizens and the country’s economic strength, he said.
On the Ukrainian Navy he said: “The numbers of Ukrainian and Russian vessels in the Black Sea [the ratio is about 1:10] does not give much hope of successful confrontation in the open sea.”
He said “the main realistic objective” of the Navy should be coastal defense – to prevent the enemy from launching a successful landing operation. That is achievable by employing Ukrainian marines, coastal artillery, improved modern radars and electronic warfare systems, and domestically-manufactured “Neptune” anti-ship missiles in conjunction with a small but efficient “mosquito fleet” of missile and torpedo boats that could secure at least a 12-mile zone of territorial waters.
He said that last year the Ukrainian Navy and Western partners, devised a Navy Development Strategy to be fully completed by 2035 and which provides for control of territorial waters – the ability to prevent the enemy from acting freely in any area near the territorial waters – by 2025.
He said that no decision has been made yet as to what planes Ukrainian pilots will fly in five to seven years’ time to replace the country’s aging aircraft. However, he said it may be more cost-effective to counter Moscow’s vast air superiority by building a thousand relatively simple killer drones for the price of upgrading the best combat aircraft Ukraine possesses, the MiG-29.
He said air defense systems needed improvement and a possible option for that is obtaining some older American air-defense systems like Avenger and Hock, as well as the European Roland system.
He said that, so far, Ukraine had only taken limited measures to build its own air defense systems by modernizing the Soviet-era S-125 system which, he lamented, he had commanded a unit of in the 1980s when he was a young Soviet military officer in Afghanistan.
Polyakov said that a Soviet military culture still lingered in the Ukrainian military and defense ministry, as did corruption, and needed to be changed substantially.
