A high-profile former Ukrainian commander has called for the head of the country’s military to step aside, accusing him of a lack of strategic imagination and putting Ukrainian soldiers’ lives at risk with “borderline criminal” orders.
Bohdan Krotevych, who quit as the chief of staff of the Azov brigade in February partly so he could speak out, said he believed that armed forces commander, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, “must go” and Ukraine’s military leadership must be shaken up.
The veteran complained in an interview that Syrskyi and the existing leadership were engaged in “manual micro-management of the whole army” and highlighted orders given to soldiers and units forcing them to rest and base too close to the front.
“I started receiving from the high army command, from the commander-in-chief HQ, orders that became more and more borderline criminal, which I, in my good conscience, was unable to fulfil and follow,” Krotevych said.
One of Ukraine’s best-known soldiers, Krotevych, 32, served in Azov from 2014 and survived the last stand at the Azovstal steelworks in spring 2022. Captured by Russian forces, he endured a short period of captivity before being exchanged.
Krotevych then chose to return to the front, and became increasingly outspoken during his final period of military service, openly criticising other commanders who he believed had been careless with soldiers’ lives.
But the veteran told the Guardian that he had “70% decided to quit” the Ukrainian military because commanders were still “asking of soldiers things which they wouldn’t ask of themselves”. As a former prisoner of war, he is one of the relatively few serving soldiers who has the right to leave.
“The general staff ordered that when a soldier’s shift [on he frontline] is over, they can’t rest in the rear, they have to rest 50 metres from the front,” Krotevych said, which he added was typically at a platoon forward observation base.
Forcing soldiers to recover so close to the front put “all these people in grave danger”, he argued. He accused the army command of being “criminally guilty of not understanding the principles of war right now” and in particular “how FPV drones work, how glide bombs work”.
The dramatic expansion of the use of FPV drones – which could operate at a range of up to 22km, Krotevych said – and Russian glide bombs, which until recently Ukraine had struggled to stop, have dramatically expanded the depth of the frontline. But Krotevych said Ukraine’s commanders had failed to react accordingly.
“They still have the mentality of fighting in the second world war,” he said. “They still refuse to acknowledge the new means of hitting targets.” He said the army commander was relying on regulations issued in 2016 to justify forcing soldiers to be based so far forward, a time when “war was completely different”.
He said similar thinking affected the positioning of larger headquarters. At one point, Krotevych said, Azov’s brigade headquarters was itself struck, after the unit had been “asking, insisting” that it be moved back because Russian forces were advancing. “They specifically told us no, and we got a direct hit.”
Krotevych said: “Syrskyi must go,” arguing that the military commander-in-chief, appointed in February 2024, had failed to break the Russian lines except into Kursk in August, where he had found “the weakest spot” and executed a simple “linear strike”.
Though Krotevych said the attack into Russia had made sense at the time, he accused Syrskyi of being overly focused on the attack “when we had huge issues” defending Pokrovsk in southern Donbas and “remaining there too long” as Moscow has gradually rolled up the salient, with Ukrainian forces incurring significant losses.
Ukraine had failed to find a way of prosecuting manoeuvre warfare while “the enemy somehow manages to break through our lines every month”, Krotevych complained.
“Syrskyi is not trying to apply a high science and an art of war,” Krotevych said, accusing him of having “just two functions: if the enemy is attacking, you just throw more people in there. And if the enemy is overwhelming, withdraw the people and say that you’re concerned about the lives of the people.”
Ukraine has been gradually losing territory throughout 2024 and 2025 as Russian forces first advanced from Avdiivka in the east towards Donbas, before Moscow’s main effort switched to eliminating the Kursk incursion.
Many observers have put Russia’s modest but persistent success down to its greater personnel numbers and a pause in US weapons shipments in the early part of 2024, but Krotevych’s comments are notable because they try to shift the focus on to Ukraine’s commanders and their direction of the war effort.
The former soldier now intends to set up a private company, Strategic Operational and Intelligence Agency (Soia), obtaining intelligence on Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other countries unfriendly to Ukraine and acting as an expert liaison with the west.
As part of that work, Krotevych said he hoped to spend time in London, though he stressed he was not aligned with Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, a predecessor to Syrskyi, who is considered a potential future candidate for Ukraine’s presidency.
Krotevych said he had no intention of entering politics himself. “I just want to destabilise Russia so it could not make war again,” he said.
Ukraine’s general staff was approached for comment but did not respond prior to publication.
