Ukraine’s Defense Ministry Needs Protection—From Itself

On Friday night, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov announced a major reshuffle of Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency (DPA), criticizing its effectiveness and declining to renew the contract of the head of the DPA, Maryna Bezrukova. A key reformer, Bezrukova is roundly applauded by civil society and international partners—from NATO to the G7 to key military donors—for reducing the number of intermediaries in Ukraine’s weapons procurement. Umerov also announced that he is dismissing members of the DPA’s similarly reputable supervisory board, which came out earlier this week with a unanimous recommendation to renew Bezrukova’s mandate.

This old-guard takedown is the culmination of a nine-month attack against the most strongly reformed but still only tenuously independent component of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense (MOD). The influence operation did not start in either Kyiv or Moscow; it originated with international arms dealers who are disgruntled over being sidelined from Ukraine’s weapons procurement supply chain and have been waging a campaign to unseat and undermine the reformist leadership of the DPA. Now they have achieved their objective.

This sordid tale is a bug, not a feature, of Ukraine’s generally inspiring story of public procurement reform and corporate governance. Over the past decade and continuing throughout the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has pursued corporate governance reform to the extent that most state-owned companies are unrecognizable when compared to their bloated and unaccountable past. Kyiv has led the world in developing transparent systems of public procurement, including the award-winning ProZorro platform. This reform journey is driven by overwhelming demand throughout Ukrainian society.

But the current setback to that reform progress is significant. Beyond undermining the institutional integrity of the DPA, grabbing power by firing leading reformers and reshaping supervisory boards chills governance reform efforts throughout Kyiv and harms Ukraine’s international reputation. Following Friday’s news, one of Ukraine’s top investigative journalists argued that Umerov illegally exceeded his powers, while Ukraine’s well-respected Anti-Corruption Action Centre called upon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to fire Umerov. Ukrainian responses to Umerov’s announcement call Umerov a traitor and a national security threat who has the blood of Ukrainian defenders on his hands. Having acted out of unwillingness to abide a supervisory board he does not control, he should be dismissed or prosecuted. 

This is the worst possible time for Kyiv to turn back the clock on a defense reform success story: when Ukraine needs additional funding for weapons and cynical opponents in Moscow and in certain quarters of Washington are looking for reasons to cast doubt upon the integrity of Ukrainian defense governance.

Reform belatedly comes to defense procurement

Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian defense procurement was an outdated mess of underpaid civil servants struggling to coordinate across overloaded and inefficient MOD offices juggling conflicting and overlapping mandates. The need for secrecy and other legal requirements had long served as a pretense to exempt the MOD from the transparency and accountability revolution that had transformed procurement systems across the Ukrainian government.

Chronic vulnerabilities escalated into existential crises in 2023, when the MOD came under public pressure due to a series of scandals involving overpriced procurements and reporting that it contracted with illicit intermediaries to buy arms on the international black market. In response, the defense minister stepped down and MOD procurement was reorganized under new agencies with reputable leadership.

A new agency called the State Rear Operator (known by its Ukrainian initials, DOT) was established to handle MOD procurement of non-lethal goods. The DOT soon put non-lethal procurements on ProZorro. Of the $1 billion it spent in its first year, it saved $300 million by contracting at lower prices than those recommended by the old MOD procurement office.

To handle the often classified work of lethal procurements, the MOD brought in Bezrukova—a reformer who had previously cleaned up the procurement process at UkrEnergo—to run the DPA.

The DPA promptly professionalized procurement management with more transparent pricing mechanisms, increased competition among suppliers, producer site inspections and other due diligence controls, and improved resource management systems, all aligning Ukraine’s defense sector with international standards.

But Bezrukova’s most audacious action was to contract directly with producers, cutting out the legions of shady and corrupt intermediaries who get rich off the notoriously opaque and fragmented international arms market. Under her leadership, the DPA reduced intermediaries’ share of procurements from 81 percent to 12 percent. To send an unmistakable warning that corruption will no longer be tolerated in Ukrainian defense procurement, Bezrukova hired as her deputy Artem Sytnyk, the strongly independent former head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

With these reformist sheriffs in charge of the DPA, Ukraine’s allies started opening their checkbooks to pay for Ukraine to buy weapons through grants to the DPA—including one billion dollars expected in 2025 in what is now known as the Danish model. Allied defense ministries see the well-governed DPA as a trustworthy avenue through which to efficiently help Kyiv buy arms while also capitalizing Ukraine’s defense industry and consolidating a successful reform project. Because it does not have to pay intermediaries, the DPA is also saving billions of hryvnias by contracting at lower prices than the ministry did in the past—savings that it plows into more weapons for Ukrainian soldiers. All these benefits are becoming only more crucial amid heightened risks around the political sustainability of international sources of in-kind military assistance—including the biggest one, the United States.

Unfortunately, the allies were not the only ones closely observing the landmark reform as it gained momentum. Some civil society representatives see a connection between the smear attacks on the DPA and its leadership and the interests of arms market intermediaries, who were excluded from lucrative deals and may be attempting to undermine the reforms to preserve their previous influence.

The intermediaries strike back

When Bezrukova accepted the job to run the DPA, a top defense official privately warned her that vested interests opposed her appointment. One intermediary advised her that direct contracting was “not how things were done” in the arms market.

Soon after she started in January 2024, these excluded arms dealers and their cronies started attacking Bezrukova with threatening messages, smear campaigns, and doxing on Telegram. The old guard at the Security Service of Ukraine, where officials are themselves sometimes the intermediaries being sidelined, placed obstacles in the way of DPA hiring.

Instead of scaring her off, the pressure indicated to Bezrukova that her reforms were working and must be continued with integrity and diligence. Unfortunately, the campaign to sideline Bezrukova then escalated to decisions made by MOD leadership itself.

In September, Minister Umerov and Deputy Defense Minister Dmytro Klimenkov blindsided Bezrukova with a decision to merge her agency into the much smaller DOT—and fire her in the process. That announcement triggered such strident pushback by NATO and Ukrainian civil society that the minister canceled his ill-advised reorganization plans. Instead, in consultation with Ukraine’s international partners, the ministry formed supervisory boards of reputable experts to oversee the DPA and the DOT—a move that was applauded by the G7.

Unfortunately, in December, the day before the inaugural meeting of the supervisory boards, Umerov issued an order approving new charters for the DPA and the DOT. The amended charters, which civil society calls illegal, undermine the powers of the supervisory boards and authorize the MOD’s manual control over the procurement agencies, meaning that Umerov can take decisions at his personal discretion, bypassing established institutional procedures, governing bodies, and management systems and. This unravels the fundamental reforms put into place following the 2023 scandals.

An additional maneuver undermining the stability and operations of the reformed DPA has been the transferring away of its funds. In November, the MOD secured a decision from Ukraine’s Cabinet of Ministers to transfer $573 million from the DPA budget to the State Border Guard Service for the purchase of shells. This caused a financial deficit at the DPA that severely complicated the fulfillment of contracts designed to address urgent military needs.

The next opportunity for the intermediaries and the MOD old guard to sideline Bezrukova came this month, when her one-year contract expires. The supervisory board unanimously voted to recommend that Umerov extend her contract for another year. He has now not only refused to take the recommendation but also announced plans to dismantle the supervisory board itself.

Recommendations for consolidating and building upon defense procurement reform

To ensure the reform of defense procurement and strengthen institutional capacity, Friday’s decisions by Umerov should be reversed, and three further policy steps should be taken to complete the reform of the defense procurement system. The DPA and the DOT must be provided with the independence, capacity, transparency, and resilience they need to pursue their critical functions.

The first step is to implement the recommendations of the supervisory boards. The MOD should extend the contract of the head of the DPA in accordance with the supervisory board’s recommendation, ensuring leadership stability and trust in the institution. It is also crucial to conduct an independent audit of the DPA’s activities to identify existing problems, address them, and develop additional recommendations to enhance management efficiency.

The second step involves revising the charters of the DPA and the DOT. The recent amendments to these charters, which undermined the independence of the supervisory boards and allowed interference in the agencies’ operations, must be revoked. The new charters should clearly establish the supervisory boards as governing bodies with real powers, particularly in decision-making and approval of strategic changes.

The third and most important step is the development and adoption of a special law on defense procurement. This law should institutionalize the independence of the DPA and DOT, mandate the presence of supervisory boards with clearly defined functions, and establish transparent procedures for selecting their members and agency leaders. The law must ensure the publication of criteria and methodologies for selection processes and the public disclosure of these processes. It should also establish a safeguarded principle governing structural changes, charter amendments, or the liquidation of the agencies. It should require regular independent audits to promote transparency and accountability. And most importantly, the law must explicitly prohibit the defense minister from unilaterally dismissing the head of an agency without a formal concurring decision by the respective supervisory board.

This is not the first and undoubtedly not the last instance of top Ukrainian officials taking down key wartime reformers simply because they are doing their jobs effectively, earning the appreciation of civil society and international partners. Such reform success stories naturally endow reformed institutions and their leaders with more money and greater influence, and those who lose out on easy money or see themselves as competing for that power resent this. It is particularly unfortunate, however, when these political power moves set back critical defense institutions whose reputations are instrumental to sustaining international support at such a pivotal moment for Ukraine.

Olena Prokopenko provided valuable contributions to this article.