Ukraine appoints Drapatyi military chief to end Soviet command culture
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi as Ukraine’s top military commander, a widely welcomed move aimed at restoring domestic stability and modernizing battlefield tactics after days of political turmoil.
On Tuesday night, Volodymyr Zelenskyy named 43-year-old Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. The appointment follows days of street protests in Kyiv triggered by the dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had clashed with the previous military chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi.
For European governments and defence industries supplying Kyiv, the leadership change signals a potential shift in how Western military aid is utilized. Drapatyi commands near-universal support across Ukraine’s political and military spheres, helping to steady the domestic political mood and refocus the government on managing the war.
The new commander represents a decisive break from the Soviet-style command culture that critics associated with his predecessor. Whereas Syrskyi was accused of relying on costly frontal assaults and spending soldiers’ lives too freely, Drapatyi is viewed as a modernizer who adopted drone warfare early and pushes decision-making down to junior officers.
This cultural shift is central to Drapatyi’s appeal. “He is a critic of Soviet-style thinking and micromanagement, and he recognises the problems with lying inside the military,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, described Drapatyi as “humane and open to dialogue”.
Drapatyi first gained national prominence in 2014 when he drove a BMP-2 armoured vehicle through a barricade in Mariupol to repel Russian-backed forces. Since the full-scale invasion, he has been repeatedly dispatched to stabilise Ukraine’s most
