S6E21: Dr Jack Watling on Ukrainian Adaptation to War

Could I ask you maybe to start off just by setting the context for transformation that Ukraine has achieved since it first started to fight Russia in 2014?

So prior to the Russian invasion in 2014, the Ukrainian military had been persistently underfunded.

It had a Soviet legacy, structure and culture.

And it It was a neglected institution.

It had been selling off large amounts of its equipment, and for Ukraine's defence industry, they weren't really allowed to make profit when they sold domestically, and so their emphasis had all been exports.

Therefore, when the Russians started fighting the Ukrainians, the Ukrainian military was in a very bad state, compounded by the political instability in Ukraine following Maidan.

However, two processes began.

Firstly, there was a mobilization of the society, which brought a huge number of volunteers and people into the armed forces with a lot of skills and knowledge of organization, of business and other things, and with camaraderie and enthusiasm.

At the same time, there was a shift in resourcing and an ideological commitment to try and change or reform the military towards what they would term NATO standards.

They couldn't necessarily define what NATO standards were, but it was a desire to break from the Soviet past.

You also had, within the military at that time, a senior echelon in General Muzhenko, the Chief of the Defence Staff, and others, who had received a high level of training in the Soviet Union.

had operational experience.

And once resource started to be committed to the armed forces, they had a reasonable idea of what to do with it.

So the armed forces began this quite dramatic process of restructuring, rewriting their own doctrine, and reimagining their identity.

This was then, I think, accelerated by the intense engagement of Ukrainian civil society.

The military was observed to be under-equipped, under-resourced, and so you had a large number of civilian companies and NGOs that began working in the frontline, exploring where they could buy equipment abroad and get it to Ukraine.

And even in the industrial space, because the Ukrainian defense industries prior to 2014 had been integrated into the supply chains of production of Soviet legacy systems, they had a lot of things they supplied to Russia and dependencies on Russian defense industry.

Obviously, they couldn't access those things anymore after the Russians invaded, and so The industry was forced to kind of quite creatively work out how it could keep its equipment running in a context where supply chains were contested, which again, I think, caused what would have otherwise been quite a stayed traditional approach to the management of the defense industry to adapt under pressure.

So there were all of these adaptive pressures on the force and between 2014 and 2022, real progress was made in terms of improving the cohesion, the training, the competence of the core brigades of the armed forces.

There were a lot of weaker units and in the middle echelon of commanders, You could see that Ukraine was on a pathway of quite deliberate adaptation from 2015 onwards.