MOSCOW, November 11. /TASS/. Maria Berlinskaya, the founder of Ukraine’s Center for Aerial Reconnaissance Support, acknowledged that her country has mismanaged its military personnel.
"Here, good engineers become bad mortar gunners, and good drivers become bad snipers. That said, we have been misusing personnel," she told the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper in an interview.
Berlinskaya recounted how Ukraine’s army received tens of thousands of people, including "the smartest managers, the smartest economists, and very good businessmen, for free." "These human resources should be used efficiently," she argued, drawing parallels between brigade commanders and CEOs of major businesses.
Ukrainian lawmakers have also hinted at how inefficiently Ukrainian military personnel have been utilized, with large numbers of soldiers missing in the army. On October 30, Verkhovna Rada member Maryana Bezuglaya, who has long criticized Ukrainian senior military officers, said that Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Alexander Syrsky, had issued instructions to convert technical specialists in military aviation into infantrymen. Ukraine’s military top brass made a similar decision regarding one-fifth of hospital staff, she added. On November 2, the lawmaker said that specialists from other branches of the military, including air defense forces, had been transferred to infantry units amid a shortage of personnel. Later, former spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force Yuri Ignat confirmed the transfer of a large number of Air Force servicemen and medics to infantry, describing these processes as "very painful."