Defence and Military Reform in Ukraine 2014-2022

Abstract

Despite having inherited a massive military at independence in 1991, the Ukrainian military response to Russian aggression in 2014 was characterized by defeat. Yet, eight years later in 2022 the Ukrainian military’s response to a large-scale Russian invasion was dramatically improved. This thesis examines how this surprising improvement occurred, given that similar reform efforts between 1991-2014 had failed. The analysis focuses on three key interrelated elements of military professionalism, namely external legitimacy, combat capability and internal legitimacy. The focus on military professionalism places the military at the centre of analysis, while simultaneously permitting visibility of other central actors in the reform story – the Ukrainian government, Ukrainian society, and external actors. Drawing on the concept of path-dependency and previous literature on military reform in Ukraine, the thesis explores how Soviet legacies ‘locked in’ forms of behaviour and structures, thus preventing significant reform in the period from independence in 1991 to the outbreak of the Donbas war in 2014. The thesis argues that a ‘critical juncture’ opened with the Maidan Revolution in late 2013 prompting events of early 2014: the fall of Yanukovych regime, annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and outbreak of the Donbas war. The thesis argues that the critical juncture provided the conditions of possibility for reform activities for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) and that genuine improvement in the three areas of military professionalism occurred as a result, evident in post-2022 battlefield success. Overall, this thesis shows that deeply sedimented military practices resulting from path dependency can be broken by critical junctures, but that this requires a political will that is aligned with the military itself and supported by domestic society and the international community. The analysis relies on data from documents, interviews, and secondary sources. Op Unifier, the Canadian military assistance mission was a primary source of data using perspectives of the CAF personnel implementing the security assistance and contributes to understanding of military reform processes from the bottom-up.