This just in from RFE/RL's news desk:
Ukrainian lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved the reappointment of Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin and Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak.
The December 2 vote came after President Petro Poroshenko praised the two ministers for their work amid the crisis in eastern Ukraine with pro-Russian separatists.
According to the constitution, Poroshenko nominates the defense and foreign ministers.
A vote on the rest of the cabinet of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is also expected to take place on December 2.
Klimkin has been serving as foreign minister since June and Poltorak has been defense minister since October.
Poroshenko wrote on Facebook earlier on December 2 that he had signed a decree on granting Ukrainian citizenship to three foreign nationals -- American Natalya Yaresko, Georgian Aleksandr Kvitashvili, and Lithuanian Aivaras Abromavicius.
Media reports say the three could join the new cabinet as finance, health, and economy ministers.
(Interfax, TASS, AP, UNIAN)
Reuters has published a pretty comprehensive look at how the Ukrainian Army matches up militarily against the separatists. Here's a taster:
The Ukraine army is far larger and more capable than the separatist brigades. Kiev has more than 41,000 combat troops, with several thousand more enlisted in volunteer militias. The total number of pro-Russian fighters is unclear, but estimates range between 10,000 and 20,000 militants.
But the Ukrainian army has serious structural weaknesses that explain why it hasn’t succeeded in quashing the separatists.
During most of the post-Soviet era, the Ukrainian army has been more of a scrapyard than an actual army. Thousands of tanks and armored vehicles, as well as hundreds of planes, sat rusting. The military was partly financed through a government special fund, which took in revenues by selling weapons and military-owned facilities. “The Ukrainian Armed Forces,” military analyst Vyacheslav Tseluyko wrote in Brothers Armed, “were in a state of suspended animation, lacking any obvious reason for being.”
By 2000, underpaid and poorly trained conscripts made up 90 percent of the army’s total strength. Few of its aircraft were capable of flying. Most of the military was based in western Ukraine near the borders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — an alliance Kiev wanted to join, not fight.
This was all supposed to change in 2008. A pro-NATO government in Kiev embarked in 2007 on an ambitious military modernization program, devised in part as a response to the war between Russia and Georgia. Kiev’s defense budget was to increase by one-third, with the special fund covering a larger share of the total.
If this plan had been carried out, the military would have become more professional, purchased modern equipment and moved its bases to the east — as a deterrent against a Russian invasion — instead of looking west to confront NATO.
But it was the worst possible timing. The 2008 global financial crisis swept through Ukraine, derailing all the plans. The army had to struggle just to pay its utility bills. Instead of increasing by one-third, the defense budget shrank by that much. Soldiers resorted to eating field rations because money ran out to pay the contractors who worked in army kitchens. Training exercises fell to the minimum.
The army had partially recovered from this blow before the fighting with the separatists began. There was no longer a draft. But the military was still far too large, with many personnel in redundant support roles. Its soldiers, sailors and pilots had also seen their skills degrade during the recession.
Read the entire article here