Kyiv, Ukraine — Ukrainian Colonel Mykhailo Drapatyi drove an armoured vehicle at breakneck speed through a barricade built by pro-Russian separatists who had just taken over the southeastern city of Mariupol.
Another armoured vehicle followed Drapatyi’s to save police officers taken hostage by the separatists in an Interior Ministry building.
It was May ۹, ۲۰۱۴, and Ukrainian forces were locked in a battle for the country’s east against Russia, its soldiers, militias and local separatists backed by Moscow — a conflict that escalated into a full-blown war after Russia’s ۲۰۲۲ invasion.
Several officers and separatists were killed in clashes and shootouts that day, their bodies lying around the building. Crowds of pro-Russian residents rallied nearby, cheering the officers’ deaths.
This reporter happened to be close by with a television crew – and barely escaped being clubbed to death by an angry crowd of Moscow sympathisers armed with metal rods.
Drapatyi’s drive-through made him an instant YouTube sensation in Ukraine. Weeks later, he led his unit out of a hopeless, lethal encirclement by Russia-backed separatists, losing only one soldier.
The now ۴۳-year-old then rose to become the commander of Ukraine’s land forces and then joint forces. And on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Drapatyi as the warring nation’s top commander who helms the general staff of armed forces.
“We share the same wish, a victory over the enemy,” Zelenskyy said.
The contrast with Syrskii
Drapatyi has replaced Oleksandr Syrskii, a ۶۰-year-old four-star general who prevented Kyiv’s takeover by tens of thousands of Russian servicemen in early ۲۰۲۲.
Months later, Syrskii outwitted and outmanoeuvred much larger Russian forces in the northeastern Kharkiv region, and two years later, launched an out-of-blue Ukrainian invasion of the western Russian region of Kursk.
But Syrskii was schooled by the Communist-era military thought – in the ۱۹۸۰s, he studied at a Moscow military academy next to Russia’s future top commanders who fight him now. Soldiers respected but feared him, nicknaming him “the Butcher” for his reported indifference to human losses.
Many within Ukraine’s military have cheered Drapatyi’s appointment.
“He is trusted very much. Those he has served with, who shared hardships with him, say that he cares about the soldiers, he takes reasonable risks,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera.
Drapatyi has been hailed as Ukraine’s first top general who prefers the Western war playbook to obsolete Soviet-era stratagems that require huge numbers of servicemen for massive breakthroughs that have become impossible because of omnipresent drones.
The new military chief also has robust credentials — even beyond his daredevil tank-drive in Mariupol in ۲۰۱۴.
In early ۲۰۲۲, he helped stop Russia’s advance on Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s rustbelt hometown in central Ukraine. He has also argued that Russia shouldn’t exist in its current form. Russia “can’t be called a neighbour, this nation with its leadership doesn’t have a right for existence,” he said in a ۲۰۲۳ interview.
Internal contradictions
However, Drapatyi’s appointment in itself does not overcome contradictions between the General Staff of the Armed Forces that reports to the Ministry of Defence, and the ministry itself, Romanenko said.
This system dates back to the Soviet era and is similar to Russia’s, while in NATO member states, the General Staff and the Defence Ministry report to their heads of state independently.
“This systemic contradiction will remain [in Ukraine] until we finish the reforms according to NATO standards,” Romanenko said.
Kyiv has been trying to join NATO for years – even though these days, many Ukrainians joke that it is NATO that should beg to “join Ukraine’s armed forces” because of their pioneering achievements in drone and robotic warfare.
Some of these achievements are attributed to Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who was fired by Zelenskyy last week.
The ۳۵-year-old civilian who had served as Ukraine’s “minister of digital transformation” was known for his Silicon Valley-style approach to warfare.
After only six months of service, Fedorov started a highly effective campaign of mid and long-range drone strikes that bled Russia’s supply routes and destroyed air defence systems, oil refineries and fuel depots.
Fedorov was sacked after clashes with former top general Syrskii, and the move led to massive, daily protests in Kyiv and key Ukrainian cities.
“This is mostly personal and political,” Romanenko said about Zelenskyy, who started seeing Fedorov as a political rival who could compete with him in the post-war presidential vote.
Fedorov’s sacking, however, was an unpopular step that only boosted his approval ratings – and left the public wondering about Zelenskyy’s motives.
“People don’t understand it, there are no explanations, the presidential administration thinks there shouldn’t be any, and it leads to rallies, tensions,” Romanenko said.
Since then, Fedorov was offered — and declined — the job of a presidential adviser in charge of technological reforms in the military.
“Fedorov felt that what he did was important, effective, that there were enough people behind him,” Romanenko said. “In such conditions, complex matters are not solved in a simple way, and when one attempts to do so, the consequences are difficult.”
Will Drapatyi’s appointment change the war?
Moscow has claimed to be indifferent to Drapatyi’s appointment.
“I don’t think that this would lead to any changes on the front lines,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday, claiming that Russia’s “successes” would go on.
“Our armed forces keep advancing along the entire front line,” he said. “And because of these perturbations the Kyiv regime is being shaken from within.”
But observers say changes in the direction of the war are imminent – if not immediate.
The shifts depend on factors such as Ukraine’s mobilisation campaign that has so far been disastrous, technological breakthroughs and Russia’s actions, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University and an analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“So, let’s not guess and see by the year’s end,” he told Al Jazeera.
The appointment has somewhat calmed the protesters rallying against Fedorov’s dismissal.
“But Drapatyi’s appointment only partially removes political tensions,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. “The Fedorov problem remains, although it may have become smaller, less acute.”
Fedorov congratulated Drapatyi on his appointment and wrote on Telegram that it brings about “a new wind and a new hope”.
