The soldiers of the First Detached Special-Purpose Regiment (a.k.a. presidential) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine took their oath of allegiance on December 4.
As the Ministry of Defense press service told The Day , the peacetime purpose of this former guards regiment is to perform state holiday ceremonial functions in which the president and the minister of defense take part. In wartime, the “special-purpose unit” will carry out four most important missions to guard such top-security facilities as the President’s residence, and the premises of Verkhovna Rada, the Cabinet of Ministers, the National Bank, and the television center.
The special regiment has a standard table of organization and is equipped with sophisticated domestically produced weapons and hardware, proceeding from the experience of similar foreign units, the special nature of missions, and the burden of responsibility taken. The First Detached Regiment is also special in being the first unit to be manned on a contractual basis, with professionals accounting for 40% of its personnel. However, the salary of a contract-based soldier does not differ from that of his counterparts in the units of other services and branches.
Incidentally, the first regiment in which the “concept of the 2010 soldier” will be tried out was mentioned by Minister of Defense of Ukraine Gen. Oleksandr Kuzmuk during a call-in session at the Cabinet Club. As he put it, the elite unit is being formed as a Ukrainian training unit, not as a showpiece for overseas guests. He thinks it a matter of the next millennium to equip the professional soldier with state- of-the-art communications, night vision facilities, armaments, and protection items. In his words, this kind of outfit will cost as much as $10,000 per man and, naturally, will not be a thing of common occurrence in the nearest future.
The minister assured one and all that a single computerized armed forces control system, indispensable in a modern mobile army, will be set up in the future. As soon as next year the army will receive a batch of modified domestically- produced mortars and T-84 tanks, with ten of the latter to be delivered before the end of this year (however, many experts are skeptical about the strategic future of our armored troops). In addition, the defense industry is preparing to put to sea by the forthcoming Independence Day a cruiser, Ukraine, which recently received 300 tons of fuel and half a million hryvnias to finish construction, and its only submarine, the Zaporozhets. It is planned to fully modernize all MIG-29 fighters at the Lviv Aircraft Repair Plant and begin to refurbish the helicopter fleet.
Simultaneously, the minister characterized as critically insufficient the number of sorties made by combat pilots: “the problem is for them to restore their skills.” This is caused by such a mundane thing as shortage of aviation fuel. To enable flyers to spread their wings again, a monthly reserve of 10,800 tons has to be established.
