Since the full-scale invasion, procurement rules were loosened to speed up critical supplies acquisition: Decree 169 (from 28/02/2022) allowed public contractors to award contracts without tender procedures. This decision proved indispensable in the initial weeks of the invasion, ensuring timely access by the state contractors and the army to vital military and related equipment. At the same time, weapons procurement by the Army was made secret for national security reasons from the first date of the invasion.
In October 2022, under pressure from international donors and Ukrainian civil society, the government decided to review the procurement procedure with a Decree
1178, which tried to strike a balance between transparency requirements and national security interests. A public contractor now has three possibilities:
1) if the procurement is not linked to wartime conditions, it shall be done under the Public Procurement Law procedure;
2) if the procurement is needed due to the damages caused by war, it can use simplified procurement methods;
3) if there is a risk of classified or vulnerable information leakage through the procurement procedure, the contract can be awarded directly.
The same decree provides that monitoring applies to tender procedures as much as to directly awarded
contracts. That measure guarantees transparency even in wartime period.
Now the government is working to align Ukraine’s procurement system according to
the NATO guiding principles of the
Partnership Action Plan on Defense Institution Building (PAP-DIB), the NATO Program for the Development of Integrity, Transparency, and Reduction of Corruption Risks in Defense and Security Institutions. In addition to the NATO guidelines, some EU member-states defense procurement experts are advising their Ukrainian counterparts on the concrete steps of how to transform the state procurement system, with road maps, action plans and KPI for 2024.
Within the Defense Ministry, the establishment of the State Logistics Operator (DOT) to systematize the procurement, of the Change Support Office, and of the Civil Society Anti-corruption Council (with 15 civil society members elected to it) help monitor and reform the processes from inside.
As a result of these steps, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov's team has redirected near
70% of non-military spending to the
Prozorro electronic system and claimed 3.5 billion UAH (about 90 million euros) of savings in logistics procurement within four months in 2023. By the end of 2023, as a result of a growing number of open tenders, procurement activities more than tripled year-on-year.