How effectively does the Ukrainian government use the opportunities for non-military cooperation with NATO? What new platforms are created with the support of the North Atlantic Alliance for this cooperation? What actions should be implemented under the NATO-Ukraine Platform on Studying Hybrid Warfare and what experience could Ukraine transfer? How to protect Ukrainian cyber space from new threats and how could the Alliance help? And, finally, why is the path of our country towards Euro-Atlantic integration so long? Is it because the civil society is the main driving force of this process, especially in the post-Maidan years?
These issues were discussed separately and in combination by participants in an international roundtable on “NATO-Ukraine: Non-military Cooperation as Response to Common Proxy Threats” on 9 February 2017 in Kyiv. The event was organized by the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research (UCIPR) with the assistance of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Office in Ukraine and in cooperation with the NATO Liaison Office in Ukraine, and the Center for Global Studies Strategy XXI.
Participants:
Oksana Syroyid, Deputy Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine;
Jan Piekło, Ambassador of Poland to Ukraine;
Alexander Vinnikov, Director, NATO Liaison Office in Ukraine;
Gabriele Baumann, Head, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Office in Ukraine;
Svitlana Kononchuk, Executive Director, UCIPR;
Serhiy Shutenko, Director-General, Directorate General for International Security of the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine;
Gintaras Bagdonas, Director, NATO Energy Security Center of Excellence;
Alina Frolova, Adviser to the Information Policy Minister of Ukraine;
Mykhailo Gonchar, President, Center for Global Studies Strategy XXI;
Grygorii Perepelytsia, Director, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Diplomatic Academy of the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine,
Vitalii Martyniuk, security policy analyst, UCIPR;
Dmytro Zolotukhin, Director, Institute of Post-Information Society;
Eugene Dokunin, Head, Web Security Project;
and a number of other Ukrainian experts on foreign, security, and information policies.
As stressed by Vitalii Martyniuk, a UCIPR analyst and roundtable moderator, the hybrid nature of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine makes it evident that military force does not play the only decisive role. Hence, the resistance to such aggression must be rather complex, with a wide range of non-military means, including diplomatic, information, economic, energy, cyber, psychological, and other countermeasures. According to him, the findings of a UCIPR expert survey conducted in January 2017 showed that the majority (74%) of respondents noted that the development of NATO-Ukraine non-military cooperation could be the basis for combating contemporary hybrid warfare. They named information security, cyber security, science and the latest technologies, energy security, and strategic communications as the most important areas of such cooperation. The absolute majority of survey participants (87%) stressed the need for Ukraine’s accession to NATO Centers of Excellence for energy security, strategic communications, and cyber security to strengthen resistance to the aggressor.