How has the Ukrainian army performed since 2015?

February 2015 marked an important watershed in the conflict. That month brought a painful defeat at Debaltseve, where Russian and pro-Russian troops managed to encircle the Ukrainian forces, and the signing of the second Minsk agreement, which included an im­mediate ceasefire and a complicated road map to peace.

The fighting did not cease entirely but, rather, switched to an intermittent, low-intensity fire exchange that could escalate at any moment. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian side could regroup and re­evaluate its performance. Since the Ukrainian army was now dealing with better-trained and - armed regular Russian army units, matching them in combat required a military reform—and the Poroshenko ad­ministration made this a priority. The Soviet-style conscript army of 18- to 20-year-olds was obviously inefficient and some of the vol­unteer regiments, sometimes difficult to control, even rejected the Minsk agreement. True, the defeats also produced some hardened units prepared to make a last stand, and the Ukrainian command now cultivated some elite detachments with higher morale. In the summer of 2015 these, together with volunteer units, managed to stand their ground during a massive enemy assault on the town of Marinka in the Donbas. The Ukrainian army also had the support of the country's numerous civilian volunteers, who collected funds for items ranging from boots to field hospitals.

The military reform started with the approval of a new military doctrine that finally designated Russia as the main strategic threat. The transition to a professional army, which previous governments had planned, had to be redesigned. The Ukrainian authorities first increased the conscription age to 27 in order to train a larger reservist corps, which could then be recalled for mobilization, if necessary. Then they stopped the deployment to the front of young conscripts aged 18 to 20—sending them to the trenches was not well received by society at large—and only dispatched those who volunteered for contract army service, usually older soldiers.

By the end of 2017, the Ukrainian army had reached its greatest numerical strength since the Soviet era: 250,000 men and women in uniform. The Poroshenko administration significantly increased salaries for contract soldiers and "de-Sovietized" the army's symbols by replacing Soviet insignia and names of detachments with those related to Ukrainian history. It also reoriented the military training toward Western models with the stated (if somewhat unrealistic) aim of fully implementing NATO standards by 2020. However, tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have gone through the joint training program, which the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and some other European countries have been conducting since 2015 at a training field near the Polish border. An ever-increasing number of Ukrainian cadets and officers have been receiving an education or improving their qualifications at top Western military schools. In 2017, the Ukrainian command promoted to general the first officer from the new generation of military leaders who had never served in the Soviet army.

Between 2013 and 2018, Ukraine's defense and security budget increased by 53 percent to $4.8 billion.¹¹ In Soviet times much of Ukrainian industry had focused on military orders, and Ukraine re­mains to this day a major arms exporter with particular expertise in tanks and rockets, most of them modified Soviet models. It was relatively easy for the Ukrainian authorities to build up domestic arms production after they realized in 2014 that the only major am­munition factory was in occupied Luhansk. Beginning in 2015, the Western allies also stepped in with deliveries of non-lethal arms and, eventually, lethal ones as well, notably American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles in 2018.

Finally, in April 2018 the Ukrainian government ceased officially designating the war in the southeast as an Anti-Terrorist Operation, the name originally adopted in 2014 in order to allow holding elections and receiving international loans, which would have been impossible under martial law or after a declaration of war. One con­sequence of this previous designation had been an unclear chain of command, because anti-terrorist measures were technically the responsibility of the Security Service of Ukraine. When Poroshenko re-designated the war as an Operation of United Forces, this act placed in charge the military, which reported to him.

The mixed conscription-cum-professional army model allowed for a self-selection of patriotic professional soldiers to serve at the front line. Together with increased funding, training, and equip­ment, this created a force capable of engaging on equal terms the best Russian units on the opposite side. In 2017, the Ukrainian forces performed well during an escalation of fighting along the strategically important Svitlodar salient near Debaltseve. During late 2018 and 2019, the Ukrainian command pursued a campaign of small-scale, gradual advances into no-man's land to secure better defensive positions. In some cases, this changed the front line by a kilometer or more. However, by 2020 the Russian and separatist forces started fighting back vigorously to prevent such movements and recover some of these abandoned farmhouses-turned-forts.

Because of the Ukrainian army's transformation, already by 2016-2017 no international security expert could talk about the Russian army taking the Ukrainian capital in a week, as some had prognosticated in 2014. The war in the Donbas became a conflict of equals; it also became a standoff that could only be solved through international mediation and coordinated measures discouraging the aggressive behavior of Putin's Russia.