A one-week Defence Resource Management Course was developed for the Ukraine National Defence University in Kiev. This important new training resource, funded by the Directorate of Military Training and Cooperation within the Department of National Defence (Canada) was first taught in February 2015 by an experienced team of senior Canadian military officers, and it was 
SSR Blog
Category Archive
Category | Ukraine
New SSR Resource - Defence Resource Management Course
By: Ross Fetterly | Friday, January 8th, 2016Developing Capacity through Ukraine’s Building Integrity Training and Educational Centre
By: Ross Fetterly | Tuesday, November 17th, 2015The National Defence University of Ukraine (NDU) is contributing to change in defence within Ukraine. One noteworthy initiative is the Building Integrity Training and Education Centre (BITEC) established within the structure of the university in September 2014. The BITEC website can be accessed here. The role of the centre is to deliver building integrity courses for
Ukraine’s Updated Security Sector Laws: What promise do these laws hold?
By: Joe Derdzinski | Thursday, November 12th, 2015Multiple potholes dot Ukraine’s road to a more accountable and liberal political regime: its 12% decline in GDP this year; the military stalemate in the east and the de facto loss of Crimea; and, of course, entrenched political malaise and corruption. It is within this challenging environment that crucial political and security reforms are taking
Patrolling Luhansk – The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine
By: Paul Biddle | Monday, October 19th, 2015Paul Biddle served as a UK secondee to the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Luhansk (Lugansk) field office from April 2014-March 2015. He was over various times security, military and police focal point, operations officer, patrol leader and patrol hub leader. In this blog post, he shares his analysis and experience of the situation
Munich in Minsk?
By: David Law | Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015The 11 February meeting in the Belarusian capital with French President Hollande, German Chancellor Merkel, Ukrainian President Poroshenko and his Russian homologue Vladimir Putin is reminiscent of an encounter that took place in Munich in September 1938. The 1938 encounter brought together British Prime Chamberlain, French President Daladier, the Italian Il Duce Mussolini, and of
Re-assessing Post-Cold War Assumptions after Russia’s Gambit in Ukraine
By: David Meadows | Friday, August 29th, 2014Since April 2014, Russia had been waging a proxy war in eastern Ukraine. Although no war was officially declared, Russia’s covert and overt support was crucial in financing, equipping, providing personnel, and supplying intelligence to the pro-Russian separatists. Still, even with such support, pro-Russian separatist rebels proved unable to counter Ukraine’s military advances. As a
Understanding Russia’s Proxy War in Eastern Ukraine
By: David Meadows | Tuesday, August 12th, 2014Since April 2014, Russia has been waging a proxy war in eastern Ukraine, through its increasingly escalating support of pro-Russian separatists in the ersatz Donetsk Peoples Republic and Luhansk Peoples Republic. Although Moscow has repeatedly denied supporting the pro-Russian separatists, it is clear that these rebel militias are not some rag-tag grassroots self-defence organizations, simply
Backgrounder – Turmoil in Eastern Ukraine
By: Chelsea Winn | Friday, August 8th, 2014The downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 serves as a stark reminder that the crisis in Ukraine has not been resolved, despite the disappearance of the conflict from the mainstream media’s headlines in the weeks prior to the incident.
Planning for “What’s Next”: The Annexation Shock and its Impact on SSR in Ukraine
By: Joe Derdzinski | Friday, May 16th, 2014Among the pressing security concerns of the day (Nigeria, Syria, Afghanistan, and the South China Sea stand out most prominently), Ukraine continues to dominate discussions across the North Atlantic. This attention is due in large part to concerns over a resurgent Russia and the unease over what Russia’s latest actions might spell for other East
First we take Crimea, then we take Brighton Beach (and retake Alaska)?*
By: David Law | Thursday, May 1st, 2014Vladimir Putin’s ideology has three basic tenets. The first is that Russia has a right and a responsibility to protect Russian speakers outside the country, no matter what. The second is that Russia’s natural borders have been reduced by questionable diplomatic and political deals that must be reversed. The third is that Russia, like the
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