If an army marches on its stomach, Ukraine’s troops should soon have a spring in their step.
The army’s old Soviet rations are being taken off the menu, and replaced with better quality food, supplied under an entirely new procurement system.
Diana Petrenya, a former entrepreneur from the city of Mykolaiv, is the mastermind of this reform.
The Kyiv Post spoke to Petrenya on July 20 shortly after she became head of the Defense Ministry’s Reform Project Office – a group of civilian volunteers who draft and implement reform proposals for the ministry. Petrenya said ensuring all Ukrainian soldiers have decent food is among the top priorities for her team.
So Petrenya, who has been working at the reform office since it was set up in 2015, has now swept away the corrupt old army ration procurement system, a leftover from the Soviet era that not only provided bad food, but fed corruption in the military.
Better alternative
For a long time, Ukrainian soldiers have bitterly complained about the poor quality of their rations, as well as the obsolete, Soviet-style supply services, which have been neglected and underfunded for decades.
“Kick-starting changes here is a really notable step,” Petrenya said. “But naturally, breaking this old system was a rather painful and uncomfortable decision for the Defense Ministry.”
For years, the army has been totally dependent on a few major suppliers for its rations. They were contracted to buy and store food products, cook meals and deliver them to military units, and to deal with waste food.
The whole system was divided among three or four companies, like Geos-Group (which controlled army food supplies in Ukraine’s western regions), UkrProdAkord (in the eastern and central regions), and Artek-Soyuz (in Ukraine’s south).
The head of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry Reforms Project Office Diana Petrenya talks to the Kyiv Post on June 20. (Pavlo Podufalov)
Time and again, these monopolists were involved in regular corruption scandals and were heavily criticized for the very low quality of their services.
Moreover, the army’s rations system was regulated by a single government decree, which stipulated meager daily portions of various products for each serviceperson. For instance, the average infantry soldier could expect no more than 650 grams of bread, 250 grams of meat, 150 grams of fish, and 100 grams of fruit juice per day.
Neither did the regulation set standards of quality for meals for army units, and the contractors constantly abused this loophole.
“It’s an absolutely unsound situation,” Petrenya says. “In my first six months at the Defense Ministry, I was trying to fix these problems. This kind of outsourced system works effectively in a lot of countries, but not in Ukraine for some reason.”
“When I finally realized that it was simply impossible (to fix), we decided to destroy it, and propose something better.”
Strict standards
Petrenya and her team first made up a unified catalog of foods, which currently includes 447 ingredients for cooking meals.
The Reforms Office also developed a computer program that army quartermasters can use to quickly work out how many products must be ordered for a new menu for their military unit.
The program is also designed to tackle widespread corruption in army procurement: food orders made by military units are automatically transferred to the Defense Ministry’s Procurement Department, which put them out to tender on ProZorro, the national public e-procurement system.
As a result, long-running corrupt schemes run by outsourcing companies were ended, and numerous mid-size businesses managed to win contracts to provide local military units with their products.
On top of that, a new set of procurement rules were introduced to ensure supplies and services were of good quality.
“We developed strict requirements for each and every meal component of the catalog,” Petrenya added.
“Now a company can’t simply deliver some trash and call it food for personnel. For instance, if a contractor brings bad cabbages for borsch, the unit’s food supply officer is entitled to reject the delivery, and the company has to replace it within an hour.”
“And this rule is actually working. The military units that use this supply system have already made their contractors redo deliveries about ten times.”
Another innovation is that contractors are no longer obliged to provide pre-cooked foods.
Instead, military units can now hire their own full-time civilian cooks and assistants for their mess halls. This has been a popular reform for the soldiers themselves, as they have been relieved of unpleasant kitchen duties and seen the quality of their meals improve at the same time.
Many units have introduced self-service systems in their mess halls as well.
“For example, if a soldier wants some more salad for dinner, he can simply go and get as much as he wants,” Petrenya said.
There should still be enough food to go around though, as the amount allocated for spending on rations per soldier (from Hr 65 to Hr 80, or $2.40 to $3) has been increased.
“That’s about 10 percent more than the average food basket under the old outsourcing scheme,” Petrenya said.
“But the quality of their food products was a great deal lower.”
As of now, 23 major military units throughout Ukraine have adopted the new system and, according to Petrenya, more than 50 will adopt it by the end of 2018.
Enforcing change
The Reforms Projects Office is also involved in masterminding several other important reforms for Ukrainian military, which aims to reach full compliance with NATO standards and practices by the end of 2020.
The office has helped unite the military’s two separate medical services – one subordinate to the Defense Ministry and the other to the army’s General Staff – into a single unified branch, as required by the roadmap for the 2020 reforms.
But while the office generally enjoys the backing of Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak, many aspects of the reforms still face a considerable resistance at various levels of the military command apparatus.
“Not everyone in the Defense Ministry is ready for change,” Petrenya said.
“That was predictable, as these people have been working in this unreformed system for years. In a lot of ways, they can’t quite understand the new practices. So I wouldn’t hesitate to say that without the support of the top leadership, my reforms would simply not be realized.”
“They’d get lost at some level of the executive. There has to be some big stick hitting from above, setting the proper directions.”
“So far, we’ve been lucky to have such a big stick.”
