Ukraine needs new format to fight Donbas war, Turchynov says

The Ukrainian government needs to conclude its Anti-Terrorist Operation in Russian-occupied Donbas and adopt a new format of defense against Russia’s hybrid warfare, National Security and Defense Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov said in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency published on June 13. Implementing martial law is not an option because its regulations were drafted in the last century, before the emergence of hybrid warfare, he said.

Instead, Turchynov called for creating a permanently active military headquarters in the war zone with wide authority to direct the Armed Forces and all military structures, as well as the state administrations governing the unoccupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Such an approach will only strengthen the foundation of the Minsk Accords. A bill has been drafted to enable this format, which will be submitted to the president for review, he said, and hopefully for parliament afterwards.

Zenon Zawada: The Anti-Terrorist Operation has lost much credibility with the Ukrainian public, which has long ago acknowledged that it’s fighting a full-fledged war. Keeping the ATO in place would have been a detriment to President Poroshenko in his re-election campaign next year, which would have been exploited by his opponents to highlight his failure to end warfare after four years. So adopting a new approach is a positive step, merely on a public relations level.

Yet Turchynov offered few details of this new format, including how this new headquarters would improve defense. And it’s not clear just how a new format can be effective if it’s oriented towards strengthening the Minsk Accords, a peace agreement that was set up to fail by the Russians (and has succeeded towards that end). At this stage, the new format seems likely to be more of a reconfiguration of sorts, rather than any significant change in strategy in fighting the war.