Zelenskyy names Drapatyi Ukraine's new military chief
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- President Zelenskyy tapped Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43, as commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces late Tuesday, pushing out Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi and praising both men's wartime contributions in separate social-media posts.
- The protests that triggered the shakeup spread to more than a dozen cities, drew thousands, and became the largest public demonstrations since Russia's full-scale invasion — second only to last summer's anticorruption rallies — with signs reading "Removing Fedorov = helping the Russians."
- Drapatyi, nicknamed "The Flying BMP" after a viral video of him plowing a flag-draped armored vehicle through a Russian roadblock in occupied Mariupol in 2014, earned troops' trust by publicly owning failures — including a Russian Iskander strike that killed 12 soldiers at a Dnipropetrovsk Oblast training ground, after which he offered his resignation and Zelenskyy refused.
- Syrskyi organized the defense of Kyiv, the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, and the 2024 Kursk incursion, but troops call him "the Butcher" over the cost of holding Bakhmut; in a Monday op-ed he denied resisting drone warfare and apologized to Fedorov for any offense.
- A Gradus Research poll conducted July 16–17 found over 60% of Ukrainians opposed Fedorov's removal and nearly half believed it would weaken national defense, underscoring how a cabinet reshuffle spiraled into the gravest domestic crisis of Zelenskyy's wartime presidency.
- Drapatyi's tenure as Ground Forces commander from November 2024 also saw the troubled 155th Mechanized Brigade — the "Anne of Kyiv" — hit by mass desertions before deployment, failures he blamed on Ukrainian recruitment and training and used to push broader military reforms.
Why it matters: By installing a soldier-first reformer at the top of the military chain of command, Zelenskyy defused the largest street crisis of his wartime presidency — but with Syrskyi's next role uncertain and Fedorov's fate unresolved, the old-school military bureaucracy now faces a leader publicly committed to accountability in a way his predecessor was not.
