The Maritime Guard Regional Directorate is one of the structural governing bodies of the State Border Guard Service, created in accordance with an innovative principle.

It unites subordinate units not by territorial principle, but by type of activity. At the same time, the specific nature of the protection of maritime and river sections of the state border requires an appropriate professional level, special knowledge of maritime affairs. No wonder such border guards are called seamen-border guards.

Unfortunately, today there is no educational institution in Ukraine to train officers of the Maritime Guard. Therefore, border guards become seamen during their servicemen while studying maritime service or seamen study border guard science.

Today servicemen without experience of serving in the Maritime Guard units serve at the Maritime Guard Regional Directorate. These are good executives, experienced organizers, systems analysts and many other professionals. But for a comprehensive, unified understanding of goals and objectives, systematic, comprehensive analysis and assessment of the situation, ensuring the highest quality of tasks assigned to the structural units of the Maritime Guard, it is absolutely necessary to have a basic knowledge of the so-called maritime competence minimum.

For this purpose, a training program on the “Fundamentals of Naval Service” was introduced in the Maritime Security Service. These are special training courses for servicemen of the Maritime Guard Regional Directorate who do not have service experience in the Maritime Guard units.

Officers and senior officers, heads of departments and services, MGRD structural units had a set of lectures and workshops to study the basics of ship navigation, including various conditions, weapons and technical equipment of ships (boats) of the Maritime Guard, ships tactics, organization of cooperation while performing the tasks on border protection, the theory of structure and survivability of the ship. The participants also studied how to tie sailor’s knots, get out of the smoky compartment, seal the holes, pilot a ship, reveal a target - all the charms of the ship's crew daily life.

“We organized all the practical classes based on a specific situation, modelling typical situations that are related to the activities of the Maritime Guard major units. The result of such an intensive training is developing the ability of officers to assess the situation at sea, maintain assigned combat readiness, use acquired knowledge in everyday conditions and also skilful confident usage of life-saving craft, "- says Deputy Head of the Regional Directorate in Human Resources Management Yurii Aleinikov.

More than 30 servicemen, including 3 women, have already completed the first course. The next training will be held in May. In the future, the practice of learning the maritime specificity of newly recruited personnel will be implemented on a permanent basis.