United and enduring: Unifying efforts to assist Ukraine in Security Force Capacity Building

September 9, 2020 - Capt Kevin Blezy, Operation UNIFIER

For the past three months I have been deployed on Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s training mission to help the Security Forces of Ukraine (SFU) build their military capacity.

We are one of several missions helping Ukraine move toward NATO compatibility. Most of the allied nations assisting Ukraine each have their own mission and therefore do not fall under a single Command. As a result, there is potential for overlap of effort and for gaps in the training needs to form amongst the missions and the SFU.

My workplace, the Multinational Coordination Cell (MCC), was created in June 2019 to begin addressing those needs. Located in Kyiv, the MCC is the resident multinational body responsible for the overview, co-ordination, synthesis, analysis and generation of proposals for the preparation of activities for SFU and the multinational training missions within the framework laid out by the Multinational Joint Commission (MJC).

Through its primary functions it can have a direct influence on events through organization of weekly synchronization meetings, or can have an indirect influence by acting in a facilitator role where it provides easily accessible meeting spaces that allow for other parties to meet and hold working groups or simply as a convenient space for liaison officers and their Ukrainian counterparts to meet. The MCC will brief visiting MJC and Ukrainian VIPs on the current personnel, training and reforms that are currently going on in Ukraine that helps them analyze successes, needs, overlaps and deficiencies of the current operations.

The MCC building is a repurposed guardhouse that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have generously provided and renovated for their multinational partners – Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

Nations that are not part of the MJC or MCC have heard about the MCC through the defence attaché network and so MCC Synchronization meetings provide an opportunity to learn about multinational endeavours that are currently underway in Ukraine. These visits have provoked discussions that have yielded new collaborations all towards the common goal of supporting the Security Forces of Ukraine.