How Ukraine went from a corrupt army "in ruins" to one that amazed the world

In 2014, Ukraine’s military was “an army literally in ruins”, according to its former Armed Forces chief.

It’s army was riddled with corruption and lacked basic logistics, from modern weapons to a medical system. Russians tanks had just rolled into the Crimea and seized a strategic piece of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.

Eight years later and a month into a full-scale Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military have defied the odds by out-performing the larger and better equipped Russian military on the battlefield.

So, how could that be?

“ They've really turned it around. It’s pretty impressive,” said Col Liam Collins, who was the U.S. military’s Senior Defense Advisor to Ukraine from 2016-2018. “Ukraine had one of the largest militaries in the world in 2014, but they were terrible. They didn't train, they were horrendous,” he told Univision.

Collins, and other military experts, attribute the astonishing turn around to a “herculean effort” in barely six years by Ukrainian military leaders, coupled with millions of dollars of training and military equipment from an international group of countries, led by the United States, along with the U.K., Canada, and Lithuania.

In 2014, Ukraine’s defense minister said the country had 6,000 combat-ready troops. Today, Ukraine’s army numbers around 170,000 active duty troops, as well as 100,000 reservists and volunteer Territorial Defense Forces.

“Boy they were motivated to defend their country and they were taking the steps to develop,” said retired Major General Tim McGuire, who was deputy commander of U.S. Forces in Europe from 2016-2018.

However, the odds remain daunting as Russia's army is twice the size of Ukraine's and its total armed forces of 900,000 are more than four times greater.

“It's horrific to see the destruction, the loss of life that's occurring, but on the other hand you can't help but be inspired by and be very proud of the Ukrainian response. And that's one I don't think Putin put in his calculus,” said McGuire who visited the training in Ukraine and hosted Ukrainian units training in .

With wars still raging in Syria and Afghanistan, and the U.S. caught up in a contentious election, the effort to reform Ukraine’s military went largely unnoticed and unreported at the time.

Critics say more could have been done, and sooner. The assistance was conducted in fits and starts, and had to overcome political obstacles, including President Donald Trump withholding of military aid in 2019 as part of a so-called ‘quid pro quo’ to obtain political favors from President Volodymir Zelensky.

Ukraine launches drastic reform of armed forces

To be sure, Russian military incompetence and poor logistics has helped, but that shouldn't take anything away from the Ukrainian military performance on the battlefield, experts say.

At the very start, Ukraine’s leaders agreed to a top-to-bottom overhaul of the country’s old-fashioned and inefficient, Soviet-era military doctrine, and the creation of a professional military with proper training and logistics.

“ It wasn’t just the assistance, the training and the equipment, there was also a commitment to reform by the Ukrainians,” said Collins, who spent two years working in Ukraine and came away deeply impressed, so much so that he’s not surprised by the results.

Unlike the U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the trainers discovered the Ukrainians were genuinely committed to defending their nation, Collins soon discovered. And they took seriously the threat of a larger attack, from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I mean, these guys are fighting a tough opponent and they're fighting well. So, they had to have resolve. Often, you can measure tanks and you can measure airplanes, but it's really hard to measure resolve and obviously Putin miscalculated on that.”

Ukraine lacked a professional military, relying on conscripts

The Ukrainian military reset began with a comprehensive review of its own national security and military defense that identified a number of issues that contributed to poor combat readiness, such as a lack of a professional military, vulnerability to cyberattacks, and poor logistics.

Part of the reason the Russia was able to capture the Crimea and the so-called Donbas region in the south-east was that Ukraine’s army relied on untrained conscripts with little training and experience. Things could have been worse had not thousands of volunteers, and militias helped in the war effort.

In 2016, then-president Petro Poroshenko asked for senior defense advisors from the U.S., Canada, the UK, Lithuania and to advise the country on how to bring its armed forces up to NATO standards.

Gen John Abizaid, the former head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, was appointed as advisor to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. To assist him, Abizaid picked Collins, a decorated former U.S. Army Special Operations commander who served in Iran and Afghanistan before becoming director of the Modern War Institute at West Point, the nation’s top military academy.

The U.S. had been conducting training exercises with Ukraine for a number of years, with names like Sea Breeze and Rapid Trident. But the intensity dramatically picked up, with up to five battalion (roughly 400-500 men each) being trained a year.

Since 2014, U.S. military advisers have trained more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers, U.S. officials say. Training included everything from “basic fundamentals” to the importance of camouflage and dispersion tactics and cyber operations.

It also included training for Ukrainian units at the t Multinational Training Center in Hohenfels, . “That's where we do our realistic, largescale training exercises replicating the rigors of combat,” said McGuire.

An entire Special Forces branch was created from scratch. Training was done at tactical troop level to senior advisors within ministries.

U.S. Special Forces were part of training in Ukraine

Most of the training by ‘Green Berets’ from the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Group, as well reservists from the National Guard, took place at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center near Lviv in western Ukraine. The base was bombed by Russia on March 13, killing at least 35 people, though no U.S. trainers were there as they were withdrawn in late February.

“ The ultimate mission of the Green Berets is train the trainers. Their job is to work with indigenous forces. That's their classic mission. And I think what you're watching in Ukraine is how that mission truly paid off,” said Roger Pardo-Maurer, a former Special Forces officer who was also the top official for Latin America at the Pentagon. “Our tactics, our training, our organization, our system, our weapons, they picked it all up,” he added.

“Our fighter pilots have been telling everyone for years that the Ukrainian Air Force is pretty good,” the head of the California National Guard, Maj Gen David Baldwin, said in a recent interview after hosting Zelensky at a California Air National Guard base in September.

Over time, the Ukrainian armed forces established their own trainers the U.S. and its allies took on a more advisory role. The Ukrainians also gradually acquired what McGuire called “the intangibles that I believe are really what sets a military apart - the importance of professionalism, of discipline, of leadership, of initiative in the chain of command.”

“At the end of the day, it comes back down to the equipment only works if you've got a disciplined, well-trained, well-led, motivated military that can use it,” he added.

Western military teaching encourages lower ranking troop commanders to use their initiative in order to be ready to give expedient battlefield orders when necessary.

“The training and advice spread to every level, pretty much across the board,” said Collins. “This cultural shift, combined with eight years of fighting (southern separatists) in the Donbas, has created a generation of combat-ready officers,” he added.

The formation of Territorial Defense Forces in Ukraine, has also boosted morale, as well as valuable human intelligence in towns and villages.

The success is Ukraine bears some comparisons to U.S. training efforts two decades ago in Colombia. “In Ukraine we found a nation on the verge of collapse. That's how Colombia was in 2000,” said Pardo-Maurer, who was intimately involved in the multi-billion dollar effort to professionalize the Colombian armed forces in what was known as ‘Plan Colombia.’

That decade-long effort is widely considered responsible for transforming the public image of the armed forces while crushing the country’s 50 year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency.

U.S. was initially reluctant to send military weapons to Ukraine

To begin with the U.S. provided ‘non-lethal’ training only. President Barack Obama wasn’t prepared to deliver weapons, worried that it might provoke Putin, and escalate the situation in the Crimea and two other separatist regions in the south seized by Russia in 2014.

That changed in December 2017, when weapons began to flow as well. included anti-tank weapons, drones, and ‘counter-battery’ radars that can locate the origin of enemy artillery fire, as well as thermal scopes to detect enemy movements at night.

The arrival of Javelin anti-tanks missiles would turn out to be a game changer. “Before they (the Russians) could move their tanks with impunity,” said Collins.

While that decision was made by Trump’s top officials - National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis - the president was distracted by other concerns, such as his own re-election, critics say.

Trump held up $400 million in aid to Ukraine

That led to the holding up of $400 million in aid by Trump in the summer of 2019 after he insisted Zelensky’s “do us a favor” by investigating allegations of corruption involving Biden, his rival in the 2020 elections.

Trump’s intervention delayed military spending by almost two years, he said. “He (Trump) didn’t believe in Ukraine. It’s very, very important that at the chief executive level, at the political level, our relatively well-conceived plans for Ukraine were derailed,” said retired Lt Col Alexander Vindman, Trump’s Ukrainian-born former National Security Council director for Europe who testified in the impeachment hearings.

As a result, Ukraine remained toxic in Washington.

But training continued, right up until just before the invasion, before the Florida National Guard was withdrawn.

“There was not a serious effort by the U.S. government for way too long, past a period of time when it was apparent that Russia had larger aspirations,” Vindman told Univision.

Even when Putin began building up his forces on the border with Ukraine last April, the U.S. response was timid. Biden convened a summit with Putin in Geneva thinking personal diplomacy could talk Russia out of taking military action.

“We should have given more weapons,” said David Kramer, a former top State Department official for Europe in the George W Bush istration.

Biden didn’t meet Zelensky until September 1 last year, where he announced a new $60 million security assistance package.

Funding has picked up dramatically. “Since 2014, the United States has committed more than $3 billion in training, advisory efforts, and equipment to help Ukraine’s forces preserve its territorial integrity and secure its borders, including more than $2 billion since the start of the Biden istration,” a Pentagon spokesman told Univision.

Earlier this month, Congress approving a whopping $13.6 billion for Ukraine, including humanitarian, economic and military assistance.

But there is debate over how much more should be provided, including fighter jets.

“There is frustration in Ukraine that the United Sta tes not providing military assistance fast enough, and with the kind of weapons that they need. We’ve provided is quite a bit, not to take away what the istration has done right,” said Kramer, who is director of Global Policy at the George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

“The Ukrainians are fighting a hot war right now. There’s still a lot more we could do,” he added.

The odds remain stacked against Ukraine, and many experts fear Russia’s superior military strength could still prevail.

“It's good to see them (Ukraine) doing well. Unfortunately, it's still a war and I don't think either side is going to win at this point. They're both losing. It's just a matter of who loses more,” said Collins.

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Zelenksy the surprise wartime leader

One unexpected additional military asset has turned out to be Zelensky’s impressive wartime leadership and communications skills.

Zelensky was criticized earlier this year for appearing not to take seriously enough the U.S. warnings of an invasion seriously enough. It now appears he was quietly preparing for war, while at the same time not wanting the country to panic.

On Thursday, Zelensky addressed a NATO summit via video link. "Never, please, never tell us again that our army does not meet NATO standards,” he told the assembled leaders, including Biden. “We have shown what our standards are capable of. And how much we can give to the common security in Europe and the world."