Separating Care from Assessment: Developing a National Professional Standard for Internal Security and Behavioural Analysis Specialists in Ukraine's Defence Sector during Wartime

Abstract Military psychologists are routinely asked to do two things that cannot be done well by the same person for the same soldier: to help, and to judge. The ethics literature on operational psychology treats this mixed-agency problem as a dilemma the individual practitioner must manage through informed consent, boundary-setting and supervision. This article argues that in a state fighting a full-scale war those tools fail, because they presuppose what wartime removes: an alternative provider, time to separate roles, and a chain of command willing to wait. The dilemma therefore must be resolved institutionally, before it reaches the practitioner. We examine one such attempt, the Ukrainian professional standard for the Specialist in Internal Security and Behavioural Analysis, developed in 2026 for the defence sector. The standard creates a distinct qualification whose six labour functions (legal and ethical framing, support of internal investigations, structured behavioural risk assessment, organisational security culture, maintenance of professional competence, and interdisciplinary referral) are derived from a single norm: the same professional may not hold an assessment and a therapeutic role towards the same person in the same case. We show how this norm is written into the standard at the level of responsibility rather than knowledge, why its narrow per-person formulation is the only version a resource-starved army can afford, and which safeguards (prohibition of pseudoscientific techniques, rejection of indicators based on protected characteristics or combat participation, internal independent review before any restriction of rights, proportionality of monitoring, and a ban on automated outputs as sole grounds for adverse decisions) are meant to keep the new role from becoming an instrument of surveillance. We then answer four objections: fragmentation of care, the oddity of a psychologist who does not treat, resource scarcity, and the securitisation of psychology. The Ukrainian case suggests that role separation can be a design principle for professions, not only a rule of individual conduct. Keywords: military psychology; mixed agency; dual loyalty; insider threat; structured professional judgment; professional standards; Ukraine