According to the newspaper, ‘Dear senior Ukrainian military commander’ Mykhailo Drapatiy said that during his service at the army headquarters last year, he encountered ‘an atmosphere of fear, a lack of initiative, an unwillingness to accept feedback, indifference to personnel issues, a claim to discipline and a deep rift between the headquarters and the units.’ His statements also highlight the continuing tension in the upper echelons of Ukraine’s military leadership.
When Drapaty offered to resign after the strike on the training base in the Dnipropetrovsk region, he wrote that ‘mutual concealment and impunity are poison for the army. I tried to eradicate them in the ground forces. But if tragedies repeat themselves, it means that my efforts were insufficient.’
This month, Zelenskyy announced that he was appointing Drapaty as commander of the joint forces — a move he said would free the major general from the administrative duties associated with the post of army commander.
The rare criticism from a senior commander came at a time when Kyiv is trying to reorganise its armed forces under pressure from Washington and other allied capitals to improve the recruitment and training of soldiers, the newspaper writes.
