The state does not always manage to provide the military with everything it needs. One reason is the lack of modern supply standards for frontline units and individual service members. To address the problem, Green Leaf NGO, together with representatives of the “Money for the Armed Forces” initiative group in Odesa, developed recommendations that they sent to the President of Ukraine, members of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and other central government bodies.
Because such standards are lacking, service members in combat units have the following ways of obtaining supplies:
1. The official route, when reports from unit commanders move through the chain of command to the unit commander, who prepares a request letter to a charitable foundation/local council, after which the letter goes to a large charitable foundation/local council. Until 20 September 2024, local councils could provide only monetary funds.
2. The semi-official route, when people turn to small semi-legal charitable foundations (because of unclear reporting requirements) or individual volunteers.
3. Buying supplies with their own money, including their combat pay. For many service members today, this is the fastest way to maintain combat readiness.
In practice, the burden of equipping and sustaining service members is shifted onto the service members themselves, who face a choice: either use their own money to improve their chances of surviving on the battlefield, or wait for the state to start doing something.
Today, the volunteer movement is the force that officially, semi-officially and unofficially helps the state supply units of Ukraine’s Defence Forces. It combines in-depth knowledge of the supply problems faced by particular units with established ways of obtaining the necessary materials and equipment. A disadvantage of the volunteer movement is that volunteers do not have their own funds and collect charitable contributions from individuals and legal entities. But by the end of the third year of the full-scale invasion, these sources of funding no longer covered all the needs of Ukraine’s Defence Forces. At the same time, the necessary financial resources exist at the level of local budgets.
The analytical note “On the Problems of Providing Service Members with Everything Necessary” proposes changes that need to be introduced at the level of local budgets and within Ukraine’s Defence Forces.
How it all began
On 28 August 2023, Odesa residents held a picket outside Odesa City Council, angered that the city authorities had decided to allocate more than UAH 106 million to reconstruct the building housing the Kyivskyi District Court of Odesa at a time when volunteers were overwhelmed with fundraising to help service members on the line of contact.
Similar protests took place in most Ukrainian cities. Citizens demanded that, instead of spending on urban improvements, local-budget funds be directed to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
On 11 May 2024, representatives of the civic initiative submitted a collective appeal to Odesa City Council, including to every councillor, identifying amounts in the city budget that could be directed to support the Armed Forces. In response, the activists received a meaningless text, and only three of 56 councillors responded to the appeal.
Despite resistance from the authorities, representatives of the civic initiative managed to secure a meeting with the city leadership on 18 July 2024. In practice, however, it amounted only to an exchange of views. The urgent problem nevertheless needs to be resolved, so active Odesa residents prepared an analytical note with recommendations on how to overcome obstacles to supplying the military.
What the analytical note contains
The document analyses, among other things, provisions of the Budget Code governing assistance to the Armed Forces from local budgets; local-budget spending on assistance to the Armed Forces; and local-budget expenditure on urban improvements. It also proposes an ideal model for combining the efforts of local self-government bodies and volunteers to supply service members, and outlines the issues that need to be resolved for this model to work.
The full text of the document can be viewed here or downloaded:
Analytical Note: On the Problems of Providing Service Members with Everything Necessary.pdf