By Erin McFee, Corioli Institute.
This article is based on field interviews with personnel from Ukrainian SOF and other elite units, veterans, and mental-health practitioners conducted in October and November 2025 in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and the Dnipropetrovsk region. Identities have been withheld for security reasons.
Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SOF) are refining a two-track system to sustain combat effectiveness under near-continuous deployment conditions, according to field interviews conducted in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk with active operators, intelligence personnel, and veteran-led support networks.
Officials and frontline personnel describe an ever-evolving operational environment with overlapping stressors and minimal recovery windows. As a result, they have adopted new approaches for both operational resilience—designed to return operators to the fight—and reintegration, aimed at supporting the smaller but growing number of personnel transitioning out of service.
Compressed Cycles and Operational Realities
During the 2005-2008 surge in Iraq, US and Allied SOF units regularly executed 3-5+ missions per night, sometimes more than doubling that during peak periods. Typically, these missions ran for hours, received extensive air and ground logistics support, and focused on direct action, such as high-value-target raids, hostage rescues, and interdicting insurgent networks. Western forces benefited from secure, stable rear areas, significant firepower overmatch, robust MEDEVAC, and the Golden Hour (i.e., world-class trauma care within 60 minutes).
In contrast, Ukrainian SOF operate with a different OPTEMPO model. Missions typically involve small teams penetrating several kilometers behind relatively stationary front lines, conducting sabotage raids like mining supply routes, destroying equipment, ambushing logistics, and disrupting Russian rear areas. While tempo is exceptionally high in terms of consistent, ongoing sabotage assignments, Ukrainian operations often last 2–3 days in hostile territory, requiring significant periods of stealth and endurance without dedicated enabling assets on insertion or extraction.
In one interview, a SOF veteran rested a hand on the temporary prosthetic that now replaced his right leg after a mine blast and recounted his drawn-out evacuation: “I waited for two days.”
This combat rhythm compresses time and erodes traditional concepts of forward support. Furthermore, the once-assumed safety of rear areas has vanished in the panopticon of drone saturation, electronic warfare interference, and persistent indirect fire. Unlike Western campaigns of the past, Ukrainian SOF face a battlespace where safe zones are minimal or nonexistent.
Operators describe living in a constant oscillation between direct combat and “partial rest” without the benefit of predictable rotations or established force-preservation intervals standard in NATO contexts. This continuous exposure redefines the psychological equation: the mission never truly ends, and “home” itself becomes part of the frontline.
The consequences of this OPTEMPO can manifest in gradual corrosion of emotional responsiveness—a thinning of empathy and slowing reaction time. “It’s not a collapse, it’s rust,” one unit leader said. “You don’t break; you harden until you can’t bend.” In short, Ukraine’s SOF are conducting complex, high-intensity operations with minimal strategic depth. The result is a form of endurance that is less about rotation cycles and more about survival under continuous pressure.
A New Definition of Operational Resilience
To maintain force strength, SOF and the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) have established a system of forward psychological support points located mere kilometers from the front for personnel engaged in high-risk missions, covert operations, and repeated deployments. These nodes provide rapid stabilization administered by combat-experienced psychologists that lasts between one and three days. Follow-up support is available for up to 2 weeks for those deemed likely to benefit from more in-depth engagement; in some cases, counselors invite family members into the process.
A senior program director with HUR said the new approach accelerates access to care by eliminating lengthy bureaucratic approval processes, allowing operators to return to duty swiftly. The framework is designed specifically for operational resilience, meaning short-cycle recovery aimed at enabling redeployment over long-term rehabilitation.
“The psychologist’s recommendation is now enough. We removed the medical commission step so operators can move to treatment in days, not weeks.”
This adaptive response fosters a cultural shift. Historic mistrust of psychological care, partly rooted in punitive Soviet-era mental health practices, is being replaced by trust in peers with combat experience. The current system reframes it as operational maintenance, rooted in local trust.
“A soldier will not talk to a psychologist with no experience in the war,” one veteran from an elite unit in the intelligence apparatus explained, “but he will talk to [another soldier] who understands what an artillery strike feels like.”
Reintegration Needs Emergent but Expanding
Reintegration—defined as the long-term process of returning to family life, civilian environments, or post-military roles—requires structures different from those for operational resilience.
Reports from both operators and veteran associations highlight persistent challenges in addition to direct exposure to traumatic events, including difficulty reconnecting with families – both physically for those who left the country and relationally for those who remained – and civilian populations in general. Loss of operational identity and team cohesion can compound feelings of isolation and alienation.
Veteran-led programs have responded by filling gaps. The Association of Veterans of the Special Operations Forces of Ukraine has become a central hub for psychological support, legal assistance, rehabilitation, and economic transition. For some transitioning operators, family-based residential programs lasting up to 21 days support psychological recovery and help re-establish non-operational identities. The Association’s Director described their long-term outlook: “We’re not building this for one conflict. We’re building what will be needed for fifty years.”
One veteran psychologist in the Kharkiv oblast described developing his own trauma-treatment protocol while recovering from traumatic brain injury. He drew from translated PTSD manuals to simplify complex clinical models into brief, repeatable exercises that soldiers could learn quickly. Over two years, he has conducted more than 2,000 sessions, teaching techniques based on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), mindfulness, and bilateral stimulation, stripped of jargon and therapy culture and, as a result, better suited to the Ukrainian operator’s needs and cultural context.
His ethos is pragmatic: “They don’t need to believe in psychology. They just need to do the drills.” It also frames trauma as an injury to be trained through, rather than a weakness to be confessed. The result is a uniquely hybrid system that combines military precision, peer trust, and improvisation.
Lessons from Ukraine for NATO Psychological Support
Ukraine’s recent experiences reveal distinctive approaches to combat psychology and psychological support for military-to-civilian transitions that challenge and extend current NATO doctrine and programs.
- Embedded care within operations. While NATO Combat and Operational Stress Control (COSC) principles endorse rapid decompression and immediate intervention when units come off the line, Ukrainian SOF have moved towards a more flexible, less bureaucratic, and commander-driven version of forward care than is typical in most NATO units, where structures and protocols may slow or compartmentalize the delivery of support. This minimizes bureaucracy and adapts care to fluid, high OPTEMPO environments where traditional rear-area support is unavailable.
- Peer-based and veteran-led networks: The Ukrainian use of appropriately trained and licensed combat veterans as peer clinicians and trusted support figures surpasses the standard NATO “peer support” model by deeply integrating ex-operators in clinical and advisory roles and leveraging lived experience for both credibility and stigma reduction. Though this is not a system-wide approach in Ukraine, various units and associations have already achieved success with this method.
- Horizontal trust networks. Ukrainian psychological support for SOF, as described by those interviewed, includes sustained, horizontally connected networks (e.g., informal, formal, legal, and family systems) that initiate intervention early in the service arc, rather than only after operational separation or discharge. These networks are deeply embedded in operator communities, fostering resilience through consistent peer, family, and community engagement and facilitating rapid intervention when needed. NATO’s focus is growing in this direction, but it is often more segmented, with less immediate integration within operational units or veteran networks.
- Endurance as managed strain. Treating psychological load operationally—explicitly managing and distributing it, akin to physical injuries—marks a shift from resilience as endurance (ignoring strain) to resilience as deliberate management. While NATO doctrine is evolving, it has historically relied on endurance and recovery, which makes Ukraine’s operationalization of psychological management notably more actionable and distinct.
- Continuous, not episodic, reintegration. Ukraine’s model of parallel rehabilitation from the first casualty, not merely at the end of service, is a more dynamic and “whole arc” approach compared to many existing NATO models, which are less integrated across the service life cycle.
Endurance Without Rest: The Frontier of Modern Special Operations
Ukrainian SOF practice shows that resilience is not an individual trait but a dynamic resource managed at the command level. By treating psychological strain like ammunition or MEDEVAC (i.e., monitored, redistributed, and addressed in real time), units sustain performance during high-tempo operations. Forward, decentralized psychosocial support better positions commanders to blunt fatigue before it becomes irreversible, and empowers leaders to intervene early at the point of need.
At the same time, resilience forged in service does not guarantee smooth reintegration. The same early stressors that build identity and cohesion can leave operators vulnerable to loss of purpose after discharge. Ukraine’s experience underscores the value of veteran-led networks and purposeful post-service roles, such as mentorship, instruction, and counseling, to sustain belonging and continuity. When SOF units cultivate emotional intelligence early, they gain stronger leaders in combat as well as veterans who can carry that strength into whatever comes next.
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Author: Erin McFee, PhD, MBA, is the Founder and President of the Corioli Institute. She is a recognized leader in the scholarship and practice of ex-combatant reintegration and security stabilization. Erin has over 14 years of experience in security cooperation, institutional capacity building, and irregular warfare. Her work has taken her to South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe – including areas experiencing conflict such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia. She has published numerous articles and frequently is invited as a speaker at events related to her work and research.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinmcfee/
https://www.corioli.org