The new commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces forged his reputation fighting Russia in 2014
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian military forged his reputation as a daring and determined fighter in the early days of the country's battle against Russia, then spent a decade in combat assignments while steadily rising through the ranks.
Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi was named to the post Tuesday after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi following days of mass protests in Kyiv and other cities. Demonstrators demanded his removal and the reinstatement of former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who was seen as a driver of military modernization. Protesters said Syrskyi embodied the army’s old, Soviet-style command culture.
In a Facebook post, Drapatyi thanked Syrskyi for his work strengthening the military.
“I grew up in it,” he said, referring to the army. “I will work responsibly, with focus and with respect for the people defending our state today.”
Drapatyi, 43, represents a new generation of Ukrainian generals forged in the crucible of the country’s fight against Russia. He has spent nearly his entire career in combat postings, including leading Ukraine’s Joint Forces, which direct day-to-day combat operations across branches of the army.
He is known as intensely disciplined and highly effective in combat, and he is often sent to stabilize the most critical sectors of the front. He has rarely appeared in public but has nonetheless gained wide respect and popularity within the military and beyond for his past victories.
His reputation was forged in 2014, early in Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine. That May, as a major commanding a battalion of the 72nd Brigade, he led an armored column into central Mariupol to rescue police officers and territorial defense officials besieged by pro-Russian militants who had threatened to burn them alive.
When the column’s path was blocked by a barricade more than a meter (yard) high, Drapatyi, riding in the lead vehicle, ordered the driver to accelerate, and the vehicle bounced over the barrier as if off a ramp. The moment, which was captured on video that circulated widely, is considered one of the most remarkable episodes in the early resistance.
It was a bold move for the Ukrainian army at the time, when decisive and independent moves by field officers were rare. The army was still poorly equipped, largely untested and wary of any action that might escalate tensions with Russia.
Months later, Drapatyi's battalion spent weeks encircled by Russian-backed forces near the Russian border. Rather than disarm and walk out, Drapatyi chose to fight his way free, leading 260 soldiers and more than 30 vehicles out of the pocket at night.
He rose through field commands over the following decade, leading brigades in eastern Ukraine, then serving as deputy Joint Forces commander when Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
In 2024, he took command of forces that halted Russia’s advance on Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih and helped push Russian troops back from parts of the Kherson region, then organized the defense that blunted a renewed Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region in 2024.
Zelenskyy named him ground forces commander later that year.
But he soon resigned from that post after a Russian strike killed numerous Ukrainian soldiers at a ground forces training center, the second such attack on the facility in months. He took personal responsibility, saying he had been unable to ensure his orders were carried out. He wrote in his resignation report that he had been blocked from reforming the branch by officials protecting one another from accountability.
Shortly after that, Zelenskyy named him commander of the Joint Forces.
Drapatyi’s uncompromising streak became public on Thursday, when Fedorov, the former defense minister, said Ukraine’s military leadership had resisted reform and pressured commanders who pushed for it, including Drapatyi, who he said had received three reprimands from Syrskyi.
Drapatyi responded with a social media post backing the Defense Ministry’s leadership that was eventually dismissed. He agreed that many changes had been pushed through “despite the system, rather than thanks to how it worked.” A commander’s silence, he wrote, “has never been a form of responsibility.”
He was born in 1982 in Kamianets-Podilskyi, in western Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region, to a family of teachers. He trained as a tank officer at the Kharkiv Institute of Tank Troops, graduated in 2004 and was assigned to the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade in Bila Tserkva, which was then commanded by Syrskyi.
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