Last February, a Ukrainian company commander going by his callsign Veter was ordered to send his people to reinforce another unit’s position over the next few hours.
He was told that four National Guardsmen were holding the position on the other side of the village they were defending in Ukraine’s east. But when Veter’s own four soldiers arrived, there were only two fighters, one of them wounded and unable to walk.
Their commander, though in touch with his troops via radio, claimed to be unaware of it, which led Veter and his commanders to misjudge the parameters of the task from the start.
After Veter scrambled for several days to help his men with limited resources, Russian forces leveled the position to the ground with heavy artillery. All the soldiers were declared missing in action – including Veter’s own brother.
“We might have planned the operation very differently,” Veter told the Kyiv Independent. “But we were going by the information provided by the commander of the unit we were helping, and it turned out to be false.”
Veter believes the loss could have been prevented if not for the widely present culture within the Ukrainian army that, in his case, made a National Guard commander conceal his battlefield problem and encouraged higher commanders to avoid responsibility for decisions about reinforcements or retreat, eventually costing Veter’s mens’ lives.
In describing these systemic issues throughout the military, one word arises time and time again, from Veter and other commanders to Ukrainian society as a whole: radianshchyna, best translated as “Soviet-style culture.”
Throughout 2024, Kyiv’s most pressing challenge has been the lack of combat-effective manpower, especially in the ranks of the infantry, where the conditions are by far the most brutal of any job.
In addition to that, increasingly, attention has turned to systemic internal problems inside Ukraine’s military leadership that, in the opinion of commanders and experts alike, consistently lead to more casualties and lost territory than necessary.
As Russian forces’ advance into Donetsk Oblast gained pace dramatically in the second half of 2024, scandals surrounding Ukrainian brigade commanders emerged, along with repeated stories about “suicidal” orders passed down the chain of command.
“Most (Ukrainian soldiers) are ready to give their lives for Ukraine, but the only thing that they want to know is that it was not for nothing,” said Lieutenant Colonel Bohdan Krotevych, who, until recently, served as the chief of staff of Ukraine’s Azov Brigade after returning from Russian captivity.
“This belief that they are doing something for a reason has to come from somewhere, it comes from the military leadership. And when people don't trust the military leadership, it's not the people who are the problem.”
Much of the focus has been on the leadership of the Armed Forces’ Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who was brought in by President Volodymyr Zelensky to replace widely popular predecessor Valerii Zaluzhnyi in February 2024.
As apparent in the public reaction to his appointment, Syrskyi carried with him a reputation of a more “Soviet” command style, who allegedly placed less value on the lives of those under his command.
The Kyiv Independent spoke to nine commanders from company to brigade level from different brigades across the Armed Forces and National Guard, some of whom requested to remain anonymous to avoid the threat of retribution.
They described systematic problems with false reporting between the ranks, shifting the blame for failures, and prioritizing holding positions over preserving human life.
The Kyiv Independent requested a comment from the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces but hasn’t received it as of publication time.
In a response to Politico in February about the issue of command culture and training quality, the General Staff bluntly denied accusations that not enough was being done to protect Ukrainian soldiers, saying that “one of the fundamental principles is the value of the life of personnel.”
Relic of the past
Since gaining independence in 1991, the history of the Ukrainian military has been one of continuous transformation.
Up to 2014, when Russia’s war first began, Ukraine’s army was systematically cut back and neglected, molded by institutions that had done little to alter its Soviet-era fabric.
During the hot phase of the initial war in the eastern Donbas region over 2014 and 2015, much of the slack was taken up by motivated Ukrainian volunteer battalions, bringing fresh energy, experience, and the willingness to move toward NATO standards.
By the time Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian land army was a competent, experienced force that was nonetheless left in limbo between Soviet and NATO practices.
As the army expanded several times over during the full-scale war with hundreds of thousands of new recruits and countless officers brought back out of retirement, the old ways came to dominate again, despite the rapid technological changes that the war was undergoing.
"When your mindset is shaped by what you were taught in some institute or university using Soviet textbooks, and you refuse to see things differently."
“Both of our armies (Russian and Ukrainian) understand how to wage war, each has its own drawbacks, but both armies share one major common drawback — the Soviet past, on which a lot is still built to this day,” said Ruslan Mykula, co-founder of Ukrainian war mapping and analytical project DeepState Map, which tracks the changing front line.
“The essence of the Soviet-era mentality is refusing to evolve; when your mindset is shaped by what you were taught in some institute or university using Soviet textbooks, and you refuse to see things differently.”
In Krotevych’s experience, this mentality is not only at the heart of most of Ukraine's battlefield woes; in its worst manifestations, it can be deadly.
Already well-known as a defender of the Azovstal plant during the siege of Mariupol, the former Azov officer made waves in Ukrainian society in June 2024, when he launched a claim in the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) against a serving general, later confirmed to be then-Joint Forces Commander Yurii Sodol, who had been in command of the defense of Mariupol.
In a bold move, Krotevych claimed that Sodol “had killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general” through negligent attitude to the lives of his men in Mariupol. Zelensky dismissed Sodol from his post the following day.
Although the case has since gone nowhere, Krotevych’s high-profile move drew more public attention not only to the case of Sodol himself, but to the system he represented.
“How do such people come to power, how do they become generals?” Krotevych told the Kyiv Independent. “Because no one has touched them all their lives.”
In an official response to the Kyiv Independent, the SBI said that investigations in the Krotevych's case "regarding the actions (inaction) and validity of certain decisions by the military command" were continuing, but that further details could not be disclosed.
Incentive to lie
One area where “Soviet” culture practices are most easily identifiable in the command chain is the problem of false reporting.
Often, lower-level commanders don’t report losing front-line positions as soon as it happens, fearing the response from higher command.
This often jeopardizes the neighboring units, leaving them open to unexpected Russian attacks on the flanks. The situation deteriorates more when mid-level commanders avoid reporting it, which delays the higher command’s decisions on reinforcements or a more organized retreat.
With Russian forces refining the art of targeting weak spots in Ukraine’s line, a neighboring unit failing to report a withdrawal can have serious operational consequences.
In April 2024, Russia’s breakthrough in the town of Ocheretyne, northwest of Avdiivka, was enabled by a botched unit rotation, when soldiers of Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade weren’t notified that their neighbors had retreated.
“We were in constant contact with them, everything was fine, we were asking, ‘Are the positions standing? Everything good?’” recalled Dmytro Polishchuk, a battalion commander in the 47th Brigade.
“Of course, we got cut off… then you have to start planning how to evacuate the people, you suffer unnecessary losses. Then they came out and said, ‘We had no communication, we didn’t know what was going on yesterday,’ but the investigation shows that someone simply covered it up, damn it, didn’t tell the truth.”
The situation described by Polishchuk is not an unusual one: Several commanders interviewed reported having been outflanked and attacked by surprise after neighboring units failed to tell the truth about lost positions.
“More than once,” said Mykula of DeepState, “soldiers have written to us saying that they learned about the movements of neighboring units from our (DeepState) maps rather than from their own command or coordination between units.”
Often, the reason for the culture of false reporting goes beyond commanders’ simple fear of retribution.
“They are not lying because they are used to lying; they are lying because everyone fears the order to retake lost positions,” added Mykula.
Some commanders avoid reporting soldiers who have gone AWOL or are unfit for active combat tasks due to old age and health problems. This leads to higher command getting false numbers of battle-ready troops and inaccurately evaluating their capabilities.
“The battalion commander reports to the top that his battalion (of around 500 people) is holding the defense line, but in fact it is a company (of around 125 people) holding it,” Veter said.
In his company, Veter filed obligatory written reports listing all soldiers in his unit as battle-ready. But unlike many other commanders, he often argued against sending some of them to the “zero” line, explaining that roughly half of his soldiers were older battered veterans, some fighting Russia in the east since 2014, that wouldn’t be able to “even walk five kilometers to the positions.”
Worn yet experienced, veterans in Veter’s unit operated Russian trophy weapons to cover trench infantry from the rear or drove cars to positions for logistics. Veter spoke up to keep the soldiers for better-fit tasks instead of losing them before even reaching the trenches.
After criticizing the order, Veter was sent away for a two-month-long training, and most of his men were reassigned to other units in his absence.
“(The battalion commander sent me away) because I started arguing with him and proving to him that he was wrong,” Veter said.
Dodging responsibility
Linked closely to the problem of false reporting is the deeply-rooted instinct to dodge the blame for failures, present on all levels of the command chain.
Higher command, especially those serving above brigade level in posts without direct responsibility for the units lower in the command chain, care little about understanding soldiers’ problems on the ground, many commanders said.
This problem is directly linked to the problem of false reporting, commanders said. In mid-2024, Krotevych was commanding an assigned unit when his troops were forced to retreat from positions completely dismantled by artillery.
“I was reporting the destroyed position to the senior officer, and I was asked to submit it not today, but tomorrow or in a few days,” he recalled.
According to Krotevych, the senior commander was worried that in their OTU (Operational-Tactical Group) sector, 25 positions had already been reported lost while the neighboring OTU had lost only 20, making the commander fear retribution for worse numbers.
Rather than a traditional division or corps-based system, command of Ukraine’s front line is managed by temporary structures including the OTU, for example, OTU Donetsk, which is responsible for the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors of the front line, and OSUV (Operational-Strategic Forces Group).
This setup places the OSUV and OTU commanders, who don’t have any units permanently in their care, as crucial middlemen in the chain of command between the General Staff and the Ukrainian brigades on the ground.
In reality, according to Krotevych and other commanders interviewed, these structures simply act as enforcers for bad orders coming from the top, stifling vertical understanding and incentivizing false reporting.
“A new commander of the OTU comes in and says, yes, you can be honest with me,” Krotevych said.
“You try to be honest with him, but he is scolded by his superior, the commander of the OSUV, and so he comes back and says, ‘I'm sorry, I wanted to be honest, but I see that it doesn't work that way. So let's do it the same way as before’.”
Commanders at the brigade or battalion level were almost never internally investigated within the army for losing people, but often – for losing ground, according to Anatolii Kozel, former commander of the 53rd Mechanized Brigade.
“This is the army. A rather rigid power structure.”
“Frankly speaking, (if you have sent the soldiers to battle as ordered from above), no one will ask about the losses,” Kozel said.
Some commanders said that especially brigade commanders or OTU officers who manage multiple brigades are often chosen for their personal loyalty to officials in the General Staff and the President’s Office rather than skills.
“This is the army. A rather rigid power structure,” Kozel said.
A career army officer fighting Russia in Ukraine’s east since 2014, Kozel was demoted in 2023 from his post as a battalion commander in the 46th Air Assault Brigade after speaking out on inadequate training and losses in a publication by the Washington Post, where he’s identified by his callsign, Kupol.
Kozel served as the 53rd Mechanized Brigade’s commander for eight months in 2024. Since leaving the position, he is not currently serving, he told the Kyiv Independent, though he declined to disclose further details.
“If a brigade commander says that he thinks the (higher) commander's order is a wrong order, the commander replaces him with someone who will say: ‘Roger that, I will do it’,” Kozel said.
A price paid in lives
Ukraine’s military leadership often prioritizes clinging onto any and every piece of territory, with little regard for the human cost, commanders told the Kyiv Independent.
It is far more dangerous for an already outnumbered Ukraine than for a country like Russia or the Soviet Union, which wasted countless lives of its soldiers for minor or symbolic gains in wars.
Some operations became infamous for causing disproportionate losses with little gain. One such operation was in the village of Krynky in the Russian-occupied east bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast, where Ukrainians held out for nine months in 2023-2024 but lost hundreds of soldiers during the dangerous river crossings.
According to numerous commanders interviewed, any reported lost position is quickly followed by an order to retake it, despite circumstances that often make carrying out such an order impossible.
“You stand in defense and every day, you are handed combat orders – ‘advance, advance, advance.’ ‘If you lose your position, regain it’,” Kozel said.
On top of this, units often get orders with little to no connection to the real combat effectiveness of the unit on the ground.
“The information gets passed up that the battalion has 400 out of 800 soldiers,” said an artillery battery commander fighting near Pokrovsk.
“The senior commander doesn’t look at who’s actually in that battalion, orders them to go into battle, when in reality it’s mostly cooks, drivers, mechanics fixing vehicles, artillery, UAV operators, and strike drone teams.”
This is often made worse by the practice of assigning brigades the command of battalions and companies peeled off from elsewhere, the soldiers of which are often also less valued.
The higher value often placed on land over personnel has been on display in Kyiv’s tendency to hold on to cities even when almost surrounded by Russian forces, from Bakhmut and Avdiivka to Vuhledar, and according to recent reports, Sudzha in Kursk Oblast.
Consistently, stories emerge after the fall of such cities of chaotic last-minute withdrawals with high casualties at the end of battles which had long been poor attritional fights for Ukraine.
One battalion commander, whose unit was defending the town of Velyka Novosilka in southern Donetsk Oblast before it was occupied in January this year in a near-encirclement, said that the extra losses incurred holding unfavorable positions compromised the battalion’s ability to hold the line later, in more favorable ones.
“A commander no longer has the personnel he lost, making it impossible to take a more advantageous position or hold the line while waiting for reinforcements,” he said.
Combined, these practices all serve to only exacerbate Ukraine’s deep manpower crisis, leaving larger holes in the front line for Russia to exploit.
“A lot of personnel have been lost due to these constant stupid retrievals of lost positions,” Kozel said.
To obey or disobey
Commanders given “suicidal orders” are forced with a choice: either to pass the orders on to their battalion and company commanders, or to refuse them.
It led to constant replacements of brigade commanders, according to Kozel. If the commander refuses a suicidal order or silently disregards it, he is replaced with someone “more loyal and eager to please.”
Most commanders regardless of loyalty are replaced anyway when they lose “too many positions.”
“Every (commander) is losing positions because there are no people, there is simply no one to hold them,” Kozel said.
Such situations, as pointed out by retired Australian Army Major-General Mick Ryan, are entirely possible in Western militaries as well: “The duty of the brigade commander is to go back to their commander and say to whoever they're getting the orders from; ‘I think this order you're giving me is not possible for me to execute, but I think I could do this,’” he said.
“But if he's then told no, you need to execute it, there are larger considerations at play, then he has to do his best to execute it.”
But in this war, where such orders are often the rule rather than the exception, the most highly regarded commanders are those willing to defy high command to protect their soldiers’ lives.
Since mid-2024, the General Staff dismissed several brigade commanders whose soldiers reacted by collectively speaking out against the dismissals in recorded videos and social media posts.
“This is a commander who plans all operations in detail. For him, the lives of each of us come first,” said the servicemen of the 80th Air Assault Brigade in a message published by the media in support of their then-commander, Emil Ishkulov, who was reportedly dismissed after resisting an unrealistic order for his troops.
Some appeals from soldiers prompted public replies from the General Staff, but no decisions were reversed.
“(In Azov), we simply don't send such orders down to the battalions,” said Krotevych, “we explain that the mission is not advisable, impossible, it violates this or that statute or norm. We explain why it's impossible, and the soldier, as he fought, continues to fight.”
“I believe that we (Azov Brigade leadership) are kind of like a shield that protects our soldiers from the senior leadership because, unfortunately, while we fight the enemy, we also have to defend ourselves against our own side.”
Hope for change
When faced with systemic problems in the military that are rooted in a deeper culture issue, correcting them and seeing better results on the battlefield is no easy task.
“Every military, whether it's at peace or war, has a battle for the heart and soul of the organization,” said Ryan. “You really need to start with showing people through battlefield failure, experimentation, why things need to change.
“Then you need to get buy-in from the leadership of the organization, a broad consensus that change is required, and we are on board for this. If you don't have that, change can be very, very difficult.”
Within Ukrainian domestic discourse on the war, much of the scrutiny towards the Soviet-style command culture has been directed at Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi, who had personally appointed generals like Sodol to the inner circle of the General Staff.
While Krotevych said that things had certainly worsened during Syrskyi’s tenure, others pointed out that all the same issues also existed under predecessor Zaluzhnyi, who had the benefit of much wider popularity for his leadership during the first phases of the war.
In a sign that things could be changing for the better, in the latter half of 2024, several highly respected commanders were promoted into the country’s top military and political leadership.
Vadym Sukharevskyi and Pavlo Palisa, who had led well-respected veteran brigades in some of the toughest fights in Russia’s war, were promoted, with Sukharevskyi becoming commander of Ukraine’s new Unmanned Systems Forces while Palisa took up an advisory position in the President’s Office.
Meanwhile, Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, well-known across the military for competent leadership that cares about his subordinates, was named Ground Forces commander in November last year.
In that time, Russian advances across eastern Ukraine have slowed dramatically, with some crediting the general for the stabilization of much of the front line.
“Drapatyi is undoubtedly a positive outcome,” said Mykula, “but it's difficult, and it will remain difficult for a long time.”
“This (Soviet-style command) culture has spread significantly over the past three years, and almost everyone has gotten used to it."
Roughly coinciding with these personnel changes, Ukraine’s leadership has announced a shift to a new corps-based system, ostensibly with the plans to do away with the OSUV and OTU temporary command structures.
These proposed structures — different from the now-redundant army corps that fought together in the 2023 counteroffensive but have since been split and scattered along the front line — will see some of Ukraine’s most professional and forward-thinking brigades, including Azov, Khartiia, and the Third Assault Brigade, each taking around 5-6 brigades under their immediate command and responsibility in one united sector.
Commanders interviewed generally expressed approval of the corps system reform, although all said that it should have been done years earlier, and that the current overstretched posture of the army would make it very difficult to effectively execute.
In what is shaping up to be a turbulent 2025, where much of Ukraine’s fate will be decided by geopolitics, the need to fight the most efficient fight possible with what Ukraine has at hand is acutely felt.
“Soldiers are mostly the same everywhere,” said the artillery commander near Pokrovsk. “What they need are the right conditions in which to hold their ground and eliminate the enemy.”
“Until we implement reforms, until we remove the Soviet mindset from our army and until we start fighting effectively, relying on Western partners is pointless.”
Note from the author:
This is Francis Farrell, who, together with my colleague Natalia Yermak, wrote this article. This one has been a long time coming, and not an easy one to write. It's much more comfortable to simply focus on the heroism of Ukrainian soldiers, but sometimes, because of these systemic problems, it is the heroism alone which is holding the line, when there could have been a better organized defense that would preserve these heroes' lives for the long term. I hope this piece is a simple reminder that Ukraine's performance on the battlefield is not just a function of Western aid, but also of what Kyiv does with what it has. As we enter a darker and more uncertain year than ever, we bring you an enduring commitment to bring you the reality on the ground. Please consider supporting our reporting.
