Ukrainian security experts have decided to join forces and create a powerful center to help the authorities assess and predict risks and overcome them. Their ideas were presented at the roundtable “A New Stage of the War with Russia: In Search of Security Guarantees for Ukraine. Internal Resilience Plan”, organized by the Defense Information Consortium together with Ukraine Crisis Media Center.
The event participants introduced the concept of their own Victory Plan and discussed the key components of increasing the country’s resilience in the war imposed by Russia, including the issues of strategy, the defense-industrial complex, countering information threats, and the social component.
In his welcoming speech, the Chairman of the UCMC Board, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Valeriy Chaly emphasized that the initiatives that Ukraine needs should come not only from the government, and called for more trust in the most reputable Ukrainian experts.
“It should not be the case that the largest or most reliable source of information is foreign media, in particular American media, despite all due respect to them. The source should be Ukrainians who have been working in this field for a long time, know this area and can coordinate efforts to help the country, and this is exactly the case,” the diplomat said.
The Defense Information Consortium includes several analytical structures. Among them are the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Express; Defense Express New Network and experts from the National Institute for Strategic Studies.
According to one of the co-founders of the Consortium, Director of the Defense Express Serhiy Zhurets, the task of the association is to influence a number of important areas. In particular, to develop the best military defense practices that our country needs now, to provide assistance to state-owned private defense companies, and to support our government agencies.
“We have regular closed analytical products called Reflections, which are released on a weekly basis. They analyze important events and offer recommendations. And indeed, we have developed a vision of the defense components of the internal Victory Plan. This document is quite thorough. It covers all the painful areas related to mobilization, unauthorized abandonment of a unit, defense industry management, and improvement of troop management. At the current stage, the issue of fortification is highly relevant. Even the issue related to nuclear weapons, because it is a component that also requires discussion at the expert level with all the risks and prospects for solutions,” said Serhiy Zhurets.
It will be very difficult to talk about victory without an internal plan and home assignments. This opinion was expressed by Valentyn Badrak, Director of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, co-founder of the Defense Information Consortium.
He said that the Consortium appeared due to the need for expert opinion on creating a resilience plan.
“We do need powerful Western weapons. We definitely need guarantees, but our document is dedicated to doing home assignments, of which we have not done a lot,” the expert said.
MP Mykola Kniazhytskyi was elected to the Supervisory Board of the Consortium.
“Since the full-scale invasion began, many of us have understood that we must somehow inform people about what is happening. Since my family is a co-founder of the Espresso TV channel, we invited Serhiy Zhurets and his team to cooperate with the channel and provide professional information to the public. To prevent manipulation of what is happening. They are analysts, and analysts want to do analytics and they know how to do it professionally,” the MP emphasized.
He added that there is no political life now but only the enemy’s desire to destroy Ukrainians. And every patriotic citizen’s duty is to contribute to preventing this from happening.
Mykhailo Samus, Director of the New Geopolitics Research Network and co-founder of the Defense Information Consortium, touched upon the aspect of national resilience.
“As early as 2017, we and our think tanks said that Russia was military ready for a large-scale offensive against Ukraine. However, we later concluded that they would not be able to implement their plan because they underestimate our capabilities in terms of the nation resilience. It is the nation, not the state, because we must separate them. The state is a part of the nation. A nation has three main components of national resilience. These are the state as a service for citizens and civil society, the citizens themselves, who form the backbone of this nation, and civil society. These three components acted in such a consolidated manner that we were able to withstand Russia’s onslaught,” Mykhailo Samus said.
Major General Volodymyr Havrylov, Deputy Minister of Defense in 2022-2023, expressed his view on how further actions in the Russian-Ukrainian war would unfold. In his opinion, the Russian Federation will refuse any negotiations as long as it has an advantage on the ground, but its position is hopeless.
“All their virtual wishes do not meet any prospects. We can recall Syria, about which Putin said in 2017 that they were there forever, and today they disappeared within a week. And this is not just one example. We must use all the advantages we have in this conflict. Our advantages are related to our society and our ties with partners. We have a great wall of European and American industry behind us. We may lack political solutions, but we have much more resources. In addition, we have a very dynamic, enthusiastic and willing civil society, which is our wealth. But what else we need is sincere communication by society and the army’s maximum implementation of new ways and methods of warfare with the maximum use of new technologies. If we can properly prepare people for this, Russia will have no chance to even think about this war,” Volodymyr Havrylov is convinced.