Polyakov, Leonid. "
Defence Institution Building in Ukraine at Peace and at War."
Connections: The Quarterly Journal 17, no. 3 (2018): 92-108.
Introduction
In 1991, independent Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union sizeable conventional military contingent equivalent to Europe’s second largest armed forces and had on its territory the third world largest nuclear arsenal.[1] The process of conversion of this rather chaotic massive post-Soviet force and building the coherent national military of Ukraine went through two major stages – peace-time decline (1991-2013) and war-time transformation since the start of Russian invasion to Crimea in 2014.