Oct. 6, 2026

In brief: Drapaty is reshaping Ukraine’s military around drone-heavy warfare, decentralized command, and younger combat leaders. His tenure has seen local counteroffensives regain ground while pursuing a 30-year plan to modernize the AFU.

Ten weeks into the job of commanding all of Ukraine’s armed forces, Lt. Gen. Mykhailo Drapaty has defeated Russian troops in sectors across the front, inflicting punishing casualties, forcing embarrassing retreats, and creating the uncomfortable reality for the Kremlin that Ukrainian soldiers are now liberating ground faster than Russian forces are capturing it.

Alongside deliberate, incremental, and slow-paced attacks that exploit Ukraine’s greatest tactical strengths, drones and skilled drone operators, while risking human soldiers only as a last resort, Drapaty, 43, has also been carrying out a deliberate house-cleaning of the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s (AFU) upper ranks. Legacy-era, older, or exhausted senior officers are being shifted to training roles, retirement, or rear-area assignments, while younger, combat-tested commanders with experience in 21st-century warfare are taking their place.

Drapaty’s command style, which emphasizes delegating authority, providing sufficient weaponry, and granting initiative to local commanders, has in some sectors effectively neutralized the Russian army’s numerical advantage over the AFU. The result has been a military buzz saw capable of shredding Russian assaults regardless of how many troops the Kremlin throws forward. Where the AFU has attacked successfully under Drapaty’s command, the formations leading those assaults have consistently been experienced combat units with excellent fighting records, commanded by officers with deep expertise in drone warfare and modern combat tactics.

In the critical Donetsk-region sector Dobropillya, currently the focus of heavy Russian infantry attacks, Kremlin daily losses have reached some of their highest levels of the war in repeated failed attempts to break into positions held by the 1st Azov Corps, a National Guard formation commanded by Brig. Gen. Denys Prokopenko, a 35-year-old former English teacher. Azov Corps recruits nationwide and promotes itself as one of the AFUs most disciplined and hardest-fighting major combat formations.

Drapaty’s greatest offensive success has come in the northeastern Lyman sector, where a former historian and part-time politician, Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky, 47, has at the head of the 3rd Corps “Troika” recovered some 176 square kilometers (105 square miles) of territory held by Russia since 2022, capturing hundreds of prisoners and inflicting a reported 5,000 Russian casualties, killed and wounded, in about three months of fighting.

Biletsky’s counteroffensive, Operation Vivaldi, is still in progress, and both 3rd Corps and AFU sources say more ground gains are coming. Thanks to its links to the capital and Kyiv’s urban, educated population, as well as Biletsky’s political connections, the 3rd Corps is one of the AFU’s most professionally skilled and best-resourced formations.

An offensive launched by Drapaty’s predecessor in January in the eastern Oleksandrivka sector has, since the summer, maintained its pace, with AFU forces scoring incremental ground gains day after day. Estimates of territory recovered from Russian control over the past nine months range from 600 to 750 square kilometers (232 to 290 square miles), with around 15,000 Russian casualties reported and 26 settlements liberated.

The commander of that counteroffensive, Maj. Gen. Oleh Apostol, 39, is a professional officer with combat experience stretching back to 2014 and Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. A trained paratrooper and infantryman, he is the overall commander of the AFU’s elite Air Assault Forces, both corps of which, the 7th and 8th, currently form the backbone of offensive operations in that sector.

In all of those operations, the Drapaty-led AFU has rejected legacy-era massed tank assaults preceded by artillery bombardments and air strikes. Instead, both on the offensive and in defense, the first act of an AFU battle is relentless drone reconnaissance, strikes against Russian drone operators, interceptor missions targeting Russian drones in the air, and drone attacks on detected Russian positions and on the trucks, motorcycles, and foot soldiers carrying supplies to those positions. Only when Russian defenses are judged sufficiently weakened are human troops risked in an attack. When assaults do take place, AFU soldiers ride forward in armored vehicles escorted by more drones.

A Monday article by the major news magazine Ukrainska Pravda described Drapaty’s command style in blunt terms: “The first word with which brigade and corps commanders describe the application months of Drapaty’s work is ‘freedom.’”

As fighting operations have gone forward, Drapaty and his chief of staff, a combat-seasoned paratrooper named Ihor Skybiuk, 49, have carried out a slow-motion purge of senior officer billets across the AFU, while shifting command structures to give the most effective formations more authority and responsibility. A key change, ordered into effect in September, placed the junior brigadier generals Denys Prokopenko and Andriy Biletsky in effective command of defenses in the Donetsk region, Russia’s declared top territorial objective in Ukraine.

Young commanders who in the past had been shunted into reserve assignments or backwater jobs, sometimes for openly criticizing stand-and-die orders issued by previous AFU leadership, have found themselves rehabilitated by Drapaty and Skybiuk and placed at the head of major formations. One of the most prominent examples was the promotion of Col. Serhii Sobko to command the 11th Corps. As an air assault officer, Sobko resigned his brigade command in 2025 because Kyiv and the General Staff were unwilling to send it support or allow it to withdraw from exposed positions. Now, Sobko and the 11th Corps are responsible for the defense of the fortress city of Sloviansk, another priority Kremlin objective.

Military analyst Giorgi Revishvili, in a Monday analysis of Drapaty’s command priorities and plans for the future of the AFU, wrote that Drapaty’s outlook goes beyond the day-to-day task of engaging and defeating Russian Federation forces. According to Revishvili, his goal is to build a Ukrainian military capable of deterring Russia and supporting Europe’s security for decades to come. The key to that, he wrote, is leveraging Ukraine’s edges in tech development so that the AFU “learns faster than Russia” and “gives subordinate commanders greater authority and responsibility” in order to make operations faster and more effective.

According to Monday reports, Drapaty’s team is currently working on an as-yet-classified strategic vision paper that has already been submitted in draft form to Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. The document reportedly sets out AFU priorities and development plans for the next three decades. Once approved, the plan would give Ukraine’s military, for the first time in its history, a long-term roadmap for its future.

Drapaty, in a Sept. 2 open-source paper, said his goal for Ukraine’s armed forces is to “achieve a long-term and just peace and create such Armed Forces of Ukraine that in the future no aggressor will have reason to consider an attack on Ukraine an acceptable way to achieve its goals.”

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/86247