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Zelenskyy swaps out his top general

2 min read

10:16UTC

Zelenskyy dismissed General Anatoliy Hnatov and named Ihor Skybiuk chief of the general staff on 22 July, the last of three command changes in eight days.

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Key takeaway

Hnatov's replacement completes an eight-day overhaul of Ukraine's entire war command, from defence minister to commander-in-chief.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed two decrees on 22 July, dismissing Anatoliy Hnatov as chief of the general staff and naming Ihor Skybiuk in his place ¹. Skybiuk is the major general who commanded the 80th Air Assault Brigade during the 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive, the last time Ukraine moved a front at speed. It is the last of three changes atop Ukraine's war command in eight days.

The overhaul ran from top to bottom. Zelenskyy sacked Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on 15 July , a decision that put protesters on the streets of eight cities for days and handed the ministry to acting security-service officer Yevhen Khmara . On 21 July he dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who had led the armed forces since February 2024, and appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi in his place. Hnatov's removal a day later completed the sweep, with one of the three chairs, the defence ministry, still legally contested.

Read one way, rebuilding the entire command mid-war signals disarray under public pressure. Read another, Zelenskyy has installed proven combat commanders precisely as Moscow conditions its public for an autumn manpower surge after the September Duma elections. He has reshuffled top command before without a battlefield break: the February 2024 removal of Valeriy Zaluzhnyi brought no collapse, though the man who replaced him then, Syrskyi, has now been removed in turn.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Ukraine's general staff plans and coordinates day-to-day military operations, a role distinct from the commander-in-chief, who sets overall strategy. On 22 July, President Zelenskyy replaced its chief, Anatoliy Hnatov, with Ihor Skybiuk, a general who helped lead the 2022 recapture of Kharkiv. It came a day after Zelenskyy removed the commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, and the week after he sacked his defence minister, so all three top jobs changed hands inside eight days. For ordinary Ukrainians, so many changes at once can read either as accountability for battlefield setbacks, or as reshuffling without fixing the underlying problems.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Ukraine's general staff chief coordinates operations but does not control mobilisation policy or the defence budget, which sit with the commander-in-chief and cabinet. Hnatov's removal on 22 July followed Fedorov's 15 July dismissal and, a day earlier, the dismissal of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi in favour of Mykhailo Drapatyi, so this time the commanding seat changed too rather than the imbalance being left untouched.

The reshuffle also lands after nearly a week of protests, giving it a domestic-politics dimension: demonstrators in eight cities demanded Syrskyi's removal and the sacked defence minister's return , and the sweep at the top answers that street pressure directly.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Completing three top command changes in eight days signals Zelenskyy is treating persistent battlefield friction as a personnel problem rather than a structural one.
Risk
Repeated reshuffles at the top risk destabilising coordination between the general staff and front-line brigades during an active Russian push on Kostiantynivka.

Source Landscape

This story draws on centre-leaning sources from United States

United States

LeftRight

Primary parallel: Stalin rotated his chief of the general staff three times between 1941 and 1942, Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, then Vasilevsky, without altering the Stavka's operational control, a precedent for changing the seat while command authority stays untouched.

Counter-parallel: Zelenskyy's own February 2024 replacement of Valerii Zaluzhnyi with Syrskyi is the closer domestic case, and it did not resolve the battlefield stalemate that followed. This time Zelenskyy has gone further and removed Syrskyi himself alongside the general staff chief, a broader shake-up whose payoff still depends on structural change rather than new names alone.

Consensus view: RUSI's Jack Watling has argued Ukraine's command turnover reflects an unresolved coordination gap between the general staff and front-line brigades, not a strategy shift. That gap now sits with a wholly new command team: Zelenskyy dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi on 21 July and replaced him with Mykhailo Drapatyi a day before removing Hnatov, so both the commanding and the coordinating seats have changed hands.

Counter-view: Ukrainian opposition MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak has argued the reshuffle answers the Kyiv street protests rather than fixes anything, since the general staff chief has never held independent budget or mobilisation authority.

Key tension: Whether a new commander-in-chief and a new general staff chief, installed a day apart, can rebuild coordination faster than they disrupt it during an active Russian push on Kostiantynivka.

Sources:RFE/RL

Mentions:Volodymyr Zelenskyy →Kostiantynivka →Moscow →Oleksandr Syrskyi →Mykhailo Drapatyi →Mykhailo Fedorov →Yevhen Khmara →Kharkiv →Ukraine →RUSI →Kyiv →

First Reported In

Update #25 · Ukraine rebuilds command as front freezes

RFE/RL· 23 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Zelenskyy sacks Fedorov after army talks

Fedorov's 15 July dismissal set up the second command change eight days later.

Occurred 15 Jul 2026

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This Event

Zelenskyy swaps out his top general

Ukraine has rebuilt the entire top of its war leadership in eight days while the front barely moved.

Different Perspectives

Belarus

Minsk announced completion of its own 37th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade near Gomel, under plans dating to August 2025 rather than a response to any single frontline event this window, keeping its hedge of hosting the war without formally joining Russia's mobilisation drive.

European Union / Operation IRINI states

Italy, Greece and Poland boarded the sanctioned tanker Toa Payoh off Pantelleria under a standing EU mandate rather than a national decision, extending enforcement from the Channel and Baltic and the Black Sea and Azov into the Mediterranean. Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto praised the crew; the captain's refusal to produce documentation left detention unconfirmed.

Poland and the NATO eastern flank

Warsaw's Coordination Team said explicitly its forces tracked the 30 July missile incursion and were ready to shoot it down, then flew air cover for an EU tanker interdiction three days later. Poland is simultaneously the war's nearest spillover victim and a contributor to enforcing sanctions against the state causing that spillover.

Ukraine (government, defence establishment and civilians)

Kyiv runs its manpower crisis through acting Defence Minister Yevhen Khmara, whose formal appointment waits for parliament's 18 August return, and a fortnight-old Commander-in-Chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi. Reported attacks on enlistment officers rose from 5 cases in 2022 to 341 in 2025, reaching Odesa's Territorial Recruitment Centre staff directly on 2 August.

Kremlin and Russian domestic economic voices

Moscow has not addressed July's advance-rate collapse or Sberbank's OFZ warning; Novak's diary ran to OPEC+ quota diplomacy with no diesel item logged since 15 July. Economist Nikolai Korzhenevsky calls the Central Bank's RUB 2.3tn in bank lending effectively deficit monetisation, a framing Sberbank's Skvortsov, with his own institutional interest, has not disputed.

IAEA (Rafael Grossi)

IAEA inspectors logged Zaporizhzhia's 22nd loss of off-site power, ten of them in the last three months, after a thunderstorm knocked out the plant's sole surviving backup line. Grossi reads the accelerating frequency, not any single outage, as the safety signal now that the plant's redundancy is exhausted.