We walk out of there and I’m like, ‘What the hell was that?’ And said, ‘That was a Soviet meeting right there.’”įor years, it was an open secret in the Pentagon that corruption was rampant in Ukraine’s military. There’s no discussion, no questions, nobody else says anything. One of the Ukrainians, Collins said, “opens a book, reads out of it for fifteen minutes, closes the book. “We’re sitting across the table with a bunch of four stars all lined up for the first meeting,” Collins remembered. But it became clear enough after their first meeting with senior Ukrainian military officials. At the time, he didn’t understand what Abizaid meant. forces in the Middle East during the height of the Iraq War, had some prescient advice: “He said they might be even more Soviet than the Russians,” Collins said. Abizaid was a retired four-star general brought on by the Pentagon to advise Ukraine’s defense ministry as it reformed the country’s military.Ĭollins-who had never deployed to the region-did his best to cram in some reading before his first trip to Ukraine. holder who had hopped back and forth between military deployments and academia, Collins was given a month’s notice in 2016 to join Army Gen. A career special forces officer and Princeton Ph.D. If the Ukrainian military had a steep learning curve, so did then-U.S. It also revealed the Ukrainian military’s slow-burn transformation from a Soviet army to a NATO-style outfit able to outfight, outfox, and out-equip its Russian foes.Īfter Russia’s first invasion in 2014, and during the war in the Donbas that has raged all the way through the ongoing Russian onslaught, Ukraine slowly began to revamp its military organization and doctrine, allowing it to eventually get to grips with its rival. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine one year ago, it triggered national mobilization, international outrage, and a once-in-a-generation migration crisis.
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