Mykhailo Drapatyi

Secondly, the EU's latest package of sanctions, and finally, the prospect that peace talks could be revived.

President Zelensky has sacked General Oleksandr Syrskyi and replaced him with a much younger commander, General Mikhail Drapaty.

The decision to sack Syrskyi is a response to widespread protests in Ukraine, and those protests were triggered as a result of Zelensky's decision to sack the Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Fedorov had fallen out with Syrskyi.

And while Syrskyi may have argued that he was resisting civilian meddling in matters that were clearly military command, the counterargument is in fact that he was ignoring and defying the commands of his civilian masters.

And that is fundamental to democracy, that the military obeys the civilian government.

Syrskyi's out, Drapaty's in.

Drapaty, very different sort of background.

It was both minister of defense and then commander in chief that were relieved, and we have a new team.

Drapaty is welcome because he's respected both by professional troops because he rose from battalion level commander to commander in chief in 12 years, and he also respected among those who joined ranks after 2022 because he is very humane.

He's very open.

He is-- doesn't pretend that he know everything, and he preach this human-centric approach.

One is Azov, another is center, which is headed by two renowned corps level commanders, which is Andrii Biletskyi and Denys Prokopenko, and both of them are from Azov volunteer movement.

And it's a good indirect proof that no one is going to surrender Donetsk region, because if it was otherwise, they were not going to be promoted.

So Drapaty published his vision where he promised to institute culture of truth because we should be honest that previous commander in chief didn't manage to build this culture of truth and information was distorted.

And when it reached the highest level, it didn't represent the true situation on the battlefield with all negative consequences.

is a former head of the security service of Ukraine with combat experience, with a lot of trust from the army and military.

So the new commander in chief, which is General Drapati, uh he uh enjoys a lot of uh trust and credibility among the army so uh and as you can see the front has not collapsed moreover uh our armed forces have been able to actually carry out again some exemplary uh short well they're not counter-offensives they are active defense operations, which resulted in our forces recapturing some square kilometers of land and catching the Russian army off guard and taking hundreds of Russians prisoners and destroying and killing thousands.

And this is the Operation Vivaldi, which your listeners might have heard about.

So I think we are now The new prime minister is doing well.

We'll be hearing more about the ground war later in the episode from Verity Bowman, foreign reporter here at The Telegraph.

But just to add that the country's new commander in chief, Mykhailo Drapaty, has prepared what Ukrainska Pravda calls potentially the first Ukrainian military war plan of its kind, citing two senior sources.

This document has apparently been under the review by the National Security and Defense Council for several weeks and is intended to set out a strategic vision of what Ukraine's military must accomplish to preserve the country within what time frames, while also addressing practical approaches to defense.

So perhaps a new theory of victory.

Okay, so what is happening? What's happening now? Why is it happening? And what's happening next? That's really the question.

So Commander-in-Chief Major General Drapati says that the military is prioritizing innovation unmanned systems, precision planning and unconventional solutions while seeking to preserve personnel.

They're not going to fight the Russians head on in the same way that the Russians want to fight them with just using mass to try to slam into the enemy and see how many they can take out while they're trying to take out as many of Ukraine's soldiers.

They're going to do it differently.