My first experience of Ukraine was in 2001. As the demilitarization advisor for the NATO Maintenance and Supply Agency (NAMSA), I ran a project to destroy anti-personnel landmines, in the Donetsk Chemical Plant, so that Ukraine could meet its “Anti-personnel Mine-Ban Treaty” obligations.
Then, in 2002, the government of Ukraine asked NATO for assistance in destroying some of its huge surplus of conventional ammunition.
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Soviet forces, withdrawing from Eastern Europe, had dumped in Ukraine huge quantities of ammunition, which was now obsolete, aging and hazardous. The major safety and security threat this posed had been amply demonstrated by the number of fires and explosions in depots within Ukraine in the previous decade.
In early 2003, as part of a NATO team, I helped produce a costed four-phase plan to help deal with the problem. Funding would be by voluntary contributions to the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Trust Fund; there was no funding from NATO budgets. It was now down to the team to get the nations (and later the EU) to ante up.
In 2004, the US agreed to act as Lead Nation for the project, but with conditions. Concerned that Ukraine’s surplus Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) and Man-portable air defense system (MANPADS) presented a potential security threat, the US wanted Ukraine to surrender MANPADS and SALW, for destruction.
I won’t bore you with an account of the negotiations that followed, which took some time to agree and included a fair bit of threats, fist banging and shouting (not only by me), but eventually it was agreed with Ukraine that Phase 1 of the project would:
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- Develop Ukraine’s ammunition demilitarization capabilities
- Destroy 25,000 tons of conventional ammunition
- Destroy 1,000 MANPADS plus 500 grip-stocks (firing mechanisms)
- Destroy 400,000 SALW
The final plan was presented to and agreed by the NATO Political Military Steering Committee (PMSC) in April 2005.
While the main financial contribution came from the US, 16 other nations gave funds: Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. The EU also agreed to fund for buying specialist technical equipment.
All that was needed now was to send an expert to Ukraine and get the ball rolling. Sadly, for me, finding someone with the right background who was available and interested in taking on the task proved difficult. My boss decided that I was the only available, technically qualified candidate and suggested I should “volunteer.”
At the time I was living happily in Luxembourg but, was given an offer I couldn’t refuse, so agreed to come to Kyiv for a year to set up the project – I ended up staying for five years and then only left when a task requiring my expertise in another country came up. But I digress.
Political issues
The political volatility facing Ukraine at the time is well documented elsewhere, but it was the impact on the project at the national, regional and local level that most affected me and the project. In my five years, effectively, five changes of government took place. These changes invariably led to root-and-branch reorganization as new ministers appointed new deputies, new heads of directorates, branches and departments; the downward cascade could last several months.
My points of contact (POC) changed with mind-boggling regularity, as individuals fell out of political favor. I worked with five different deputy defense ministers, five different heads of the defense utilization department, four different heads of the economics directorate and nine different defense ministry project officers. Similar changes occurred in other ministries, which, at one time or another, made decisions affecting the project. This lack of continuity resulted in a continual need to re-educate new POCs on the aims of the project and to re-justify operational and other decisions that had been taken or needed to be made.
On top of this, Ukrainian national and local governmental bureaucracy was also a barrier to timely progress. It seemed that even the most minor technical and operational decisions required Cabinet of Ministers approval, full inter-ministerial coordination and agreement, and often regional and even municipal-level endorsement.
Even so, we managed to get the job done – somehow.
What did we do?
Project management: In December 2005 we set up a project office in the NATO Liaison Office (NLO) in Kyiv. I was responsible for all technical, operational, safety, financial and contractual aspects of the project as well as liaising with Ukrainian government representatives and donors.
I didn’t speak any Ukrainian (and to my great shame still don’t) so my first task was to find an assistant who could act as my interpreter/translator and, more by luck than judgement, I found “Tanya” – who was worth her weight in gold and made my life so much easier than it would have otherwise been.
Over the next few months, as the project developed, I also recruited three verification auditors (VA), who would oversee, record and report on the progress of the project, and who also had the authority to intercede if tasks were carried out unsafely or incorrectly. This was vital if we were to continue to squeeze funding from our sponsors.
Demilitarization Facilities: Improvements were made at four sites, the Donetsk Chemical Plant plus two Ukroboronservice (UOS) ammunition facilities in Hrechany, in the Khmelnytsky region in southwest Ukraine and Shostka, in the Sumy region of northern Ukraine, close to the Russian and Belarusian borders.
In addition to funding for infrastructure improvements at the three locations we purchased, at great expense, a gas-fired explosive waste incinerator (EWI) from the US company El Dorado Engineering (EDE), which had to be provided with a unique, bespoke pollution abatement system (PAS) to deal with the high levels of mercury present in many types of Soviet ammunition. This was installed in Donetsk.
As an aside, I was informed that the EWI had been dismantled and taken to Russia within weeks of the February 2022 invasion. UOS designed and built its own smaller but effective electric-fired EWI in the Hrechany plant.
MANPADS destruction
Originally, our plan had envisaged disassembling the missiles in order to recover their components, some of which included rare metals. A disassembly trial was conducted at the military ammunition depot at Balaklaya, some 500 kilometers (311 miles) southeast of Kyiv in December 2005. Although the trial showed disassembly was technically viable, we found it to be financially and logistically impracticable, so we decided to destroy the missiles by open detonation – which proved to be popular with VIP visitors to the project because it was so much “sexier” than breaking them down in a workshop.
Destruction was carried out at a former missile storage site managed by the State Scientific Institute for Chemical Research in Shostka, northeast Ukraine.
We kicked off with a formal opening ceremony on June 20, 2006, and destruction of the 1,000 missiles and 500 Gripstocks (firing units) was completed in three months and marked with a closing ceremony on Sept. 20, 2006.
During 2007 and early 2008, the US and I held a number of meetings with the Ukrainian government, to try to negotiate the provision of additional MANPADS missiles and Gripstocks for destruction, but our Ukrainian counterparts were resolute in refusing. I later learnt that the reason was that representatives of US Homeland Security had negotiated the purchase of around 2,000 missiles for trials to protect civilian and military aircraft from possible terrorist attack while we were just covering the cost of destruction. Talk about left hand – right hand.
Small arms and light weapons (SALW) destruction
Military Unit 4182, a weapons and vehicle maintenance depot at Kamyanets-Podilsky, 480 kilometers (298 miles) southwest of Kyiv was proposed to NAMSA by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the state enterprise Ukroboronleasing (UOL) as the site for the destruction of small arms and light weapons (SALW). UOL had already begun preparation of a secure area within the depot for this purpose.
Included in the site was a separate secure area for the storage and maintenance of weapons in which SALW destruction would take place. UOL also instituted a computerized audit system with each weapon being assigned and marked with a barcode that was scanned at each stage of the disassembly and destruction process.
SALW destruction became very much a political football, and though it was initiated in January 2007 it was not completed until the middle of 2011. We were faced with objections from a number of ministries, which thought the weapons should be sold, or deactivated and converted to “replica” weapons.
It took very high-level discussions between the government at ministerial level, US State Department as Lead Nation, EC and NAMSA that lasted throughout 2008 and 2009 to (partially) resolve the impasse.
The deactivation proposal was given due consideration by the Lead Nation, the EC, NAMSA and others, but eventually, the government of Ukraine conceded in September 2009 that it was an impracticable way forward and indicated that it was now prepared to release the balance of agreed weapons to the project after Cabinet of Ministers endorsement. In return the US said it would fund a follow-on project once the current operations were completed.
The balance of weapons was eventually released to us in May 2010 with final destruction of the agreed 400,000 weapons being completed on April 30, 2011. A summary of what was destroyed is shown in the table below.
Conventional ammunition destruction
The original plan for this was to establish a new demilitarization facility in Kalynivka but this was vetoed by local authorities on “environmental grounds.” A pragmatic decision was taken to utilize existing state-owned capability at four separate existing sites in Shostka, Pavlograd, Donetsk, and Hrechany.
While this had the advantage of providing funding to sites that were lacking current investment and provided some political reassurance to “opposition” areas what we now know was becoming of increasing concern.
However, the logistic, financial and political issues blew up (no pun intended) and the project ground to a halt. In particular, Ukraine could not (or would not) ante up its agreed financial contribution. This led to the US, as Lead Nation, threatening to terminate the project, at the end of 2008 and I was instructed to prepare a project termination plan to expend only those funds currently committed to the project.
In the process of working on this, NAMSA received an unsolicited proposal in February 2009 from the state enterprise Ukroboronservice (UOS) to undertake the destruction of this ammunition at its facility in Hrechany and at the State Scientific Research Institute for Chemical Products (SSRIC) Shostka, for €250 per ton – accepting that this could be done with no financial input from the Ukrainian government and on the understanding that UOS would be permitted to sell recovered recyclable material.
This proposal was supported by NAMSA and accepted by the Lead Nation and the government released the required quantities of ammunition allowing final destruction to be completed by April 2010. Although a total of just over 8,000 tons rather than the planned 25,000 was achieved the project provided facilities that led to a further follow-on project that started in 2012.
Here is a summary of what was destroyed:
Conclusions
The project was always going to be a huge and complex operational, technical and logistic challenge; the largest single project undertaken by the NATO PfP Trust Fund. This was further exacerbated by outside influences, mainly political, which had not been planned for or predicted.
The project that was intended to be completed in three years, between 2006 and 2008, had to be extended by an additional 18 months and had only achieved about half of the original aim.
As the responsible project officer, I was concerned that I had failed until Steven C., the Deputy Director of the US State Department’s Office Weapons Removal and Abatement (PM/WRA) took me to one side and said, “I am funding 14 projects in Ukraine and yours is the only one that has come anywhere near achieving its aim.”
He even asked me to stay on to run the second project but, much to my Ukrainian wife’s chagrin, NAMSA had other plans for me, and I was soon on a plane to Turkey to set up a landmine clearance project – but that’s another story for another time.
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