Stefan Korshak
Training, honesty about problems inside the force, and a focus on finding the enemy and destroying them were the priorities named by the number two man in the Ukrainian military, Major General Andriy Hnatov, in a rare, wide-ranging interview Tuesday.
In remarks published by the state-run Ukrinform news agency, Hnatov, a 30-year veteran, since March serving as the Chief of the Army General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), said that his country’s military is an organization that has learned to acknowledge imperfections and discuss them, but it’s not always been easy.
“If you compare, for example, the situation when I was a young officer and joined the army – what was the communication like, what were the relationships (within the chain of command) were like – then I can tell you that we have finished a marathon. I believe that now both the leadership and the units are quite open, and (now) we speak openly about successes and failures,” Hnatov said in part.
Hnatov, 45, served most of his career in elite marine units, and in February 2022 was a high-profile commander leading Ukrainian forces fighting in the southern Kherson sector. In March, Hnatov was promoted to head the Army General Staff (AGS), as part of an overhaul of national military leadership replacing older with younger officers, ordered by President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the time, Zelensky said he wanted more experienced combat leaders at the top of the organization.
Saturday’s article in The Times reports on the 425th Separate Assault Regiment draws attention to its frontline successes but there are wider concerns about the way its leadership achieves its wins.
Six months into his tour as the Ukrainian army’s senior planning officer, Hnatov said that the AFU remains an only partially professional force of career officers and enlisted, along with mobilized civilians still learning how to be soldiers on the job, at times in battle. Improving combat effectiveness takes training and discipline and frank discussion of mistakes, and civilian inclination to be polite and downplay problems doesn’t disappear the moment a Ukrainian citizen puts on a uniform, he said.
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