Zelensky removes army chief Syrskyi after six days of

Photo: Press Service of the Office of the President of Ukraine / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0

President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed General Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces on Tuesday and appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi in his place, ending six days of street protests that had demanded exactly that.

Why it matters

The man now running Ukraine’s war is there partly because he once quit. In June 2025 Drapatyi resigned as commander of the Ground Forces after a Russian ballistic missile hit a training ground and killed twelve soldiers, calling it a step “dictated by my personal sense of responsibility.” He was kept in uniform and moved to the Joint Forces Command instead. Thirteen months later, protesters demanding accountability from the high command named him as the officer they wanted, and he has the top job. In an army where Russian strikes on training grounds killed at least seventy soldiers during 2025 and produced few visible consequences for anyone, the one commander who imposed a consequence on himself became the credible candidate — which describes what the protests were actually about more precisely than any of the official reasoning does.

The demonstrations began after Zelensky removed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had clashed with Syrskyi and whom protesters credited with driving the military’s modernisation. Crowds in Kyiv and other cities called for Fedorov’s reinstatement and for Syrskyi to go, describing the commander as the embodiment of a Soviet-inherited command culture the army has spent the war trying to shed.

Sustained street protest is itself notable in wartime Ukraine. Martial law has suspended national elections since 2022, which leaves demonstrations as one of the few remaining channels for public pressure on the government — and makes a government that yields to them inside a week an unusual data point.

Drapatyi is 43 and belongs to the generation of Ukrainian officers whose careers were made in this war rather than before it. In 2024 he commanded the forces that halted Russia’s advance on Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s home city, and helped push Russian troops back from parts of the Kherson region.

He also carries the most unusual line on the record of any senior Ukrainian commander. On June 1, 2025, Drapatyi resigned as commander of the Ground Forces after a Russian Iskander missile struck a training ground run by the 239th training centre, killing twelve soldiers. “This is a deliberate step dictated by my personal sense of responsibility for the tragedy at the 239th training ground that killed our soldiers,” he said at the time. He had promised a full investigation after an earlier strike on a training ground at Cherkaske, in Dnipropetrovsk region, killed close to forty trainees that March.

The resignation was accepted in form but not in effect. Drapatyi remained in the armed forces and was reassigned to lead the Joint Forces Command. Russian strikes on Ukrainian training facilities through 2025 killed at least seventy soldiers in total and wounded hundreds more.

Syrskyi had held the top job since February 2024, when he replaced Valerii Zaluzhnyi. Ukraine has now changed commander-in-chief twice in about two and a half years, on each occasion in the middle of a public argument about whether the army’s leadership was adapting quickly enough to a war that has changed shape repeatedly.

The war has not paused for the reshuffle. Russian long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities have continued through the summer, including the barrage that killed at least 26 people in Kyiv in early July.

Zelensky removes army chief Syrskyi after six days of protests, promotes Drapatyi

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