![]() Zaluzhnyy then returned to the academy for more training and graduated in 2014, a few months after the Maidan Revolution led then-President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia, and as war was intensifying in Donbas. A series of posts followed, including as commander of a mechanized brigade. He attended the Institute of Land Forces of the Odesa Military Academy and the National Defense Academy in Kyiv, where he completed his studies in 2007. Zaluzhnyy started life as a military baby, born in July 1973 when his father was stationed at a garrison in Novohrad-Volyns’kyi, a town in Zhytomyr region in northern Ukraine, roughly 150 miles west of Kyiv. Since 2014, Ukrainians “can better adapt and react with initiative in a way that it could not before,” the official said, adding that flexibility has been a game-changer so far against a Russian onslaught that has fielded “a larger, more capable force - who is all about its rigid plan.” Military man military officials requested anonymity to discuss assessments of how the war is going, and Ukrainian capabilities. defense official told POLITICO, who like other current and former U.S. “The Ukrainians are able to stay nimble,” a U.S. That training and battlefield experience against the Russians and their separatist proxies in Donbas allowed commanders of small, dispersed units to think for themselves, overturning the old Soviet model of top-down leadership that has paralyzed Russian units and forced top generals to venture to the front lines, where several have been killed. Over the next years, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Poland, Lithuania and other NATO allies opened training centers in western Ukraine, including for special operations forces. 24 (top), Ukrainian military facilities and other infrastructure in Mariupol and throughout Ukraine were severely damaged as a result of the first day of Russian shelling (bottom).Įmilio Morenatti and Evgeniy Maloletka/AP Photo But preparation for wider combat had been ongoing since Russian troops stormed into Crimea in 2014, annexing the peninsula and turning Donbas into permanent combat zone.Īs people rushed to catch trains out of Kyiv on Feb. 24 as Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv and missiles hit targets across Ukraine. To much of the world’s horror, the scenario of “full-scale aggression” became reality on Feb. “I reminded the allies that our war has been going on since 2014, and we have been doing our job ever since,” he told the national news agency Ukrinform after the meeting. In January, Zaluzhnyy spoke to NATO’s Military Committee, the alliance’s top body of uniformed officers, and told them Ukraine’s military was ready. ![]() We are doing everything possible to make the enemy, so to speak, less willing to implement such a scenario.” For our part, we are conducting a set of exercises, including our Western partners, including NATO members, as well as NATO partners. “Accordingly, our task as the Armed Forces is not to wait for manna from heaven. Interview with Radio Svoboda at the time. “I have always been talking about this since I took office - because this is a threat of full-scale aggression,” Zaluzhnyy said in an President Joe Biden’s administration began issuing loud warnings of a Russian invasion and sharing intelligence about the troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders, Zaluzhnyy described preparing for an attack. In September 2021, two months before U.S. “I can probably talk about not just as a single person but as a representative of the new generation of Ukrainian military - senior, middle level and even low level officers,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian air force officer who is now co-director of foreign relations and international security programs at the Razumkov Centre, a Kyiv-based think tank. That collaboration with NATO has molded a group of professional-minded officers that aspired to Western standards and helped build a decentralized, empowered, more agile way of warfare than the Russian model, which has floundered in the Ukrainian mud. ![]() In many ways Zaluzhnyy epitomizes a new generation of Ukrainian officers who cut their teeth in the grinding eight-year war in Donbas and, when not on the front, deployed to training ranges across Europe to drill with NATO forces - experiences that have sanded off many of the authoritarian edges produced by decades of rigid Soviet military training.
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