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Ukraine’s newly appointed military chief has vowed to expand and intensify offensive operations against Russia, including strikes behind enemy lines.

Getting into it: The announcement was made by Mykhailo Drapatyi, a 43-year-old major general named commander of Ukraine’s armed forces on Tuesday by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who fired 60-year-old Oleksandr Syrskyi to make room for him. Drapatyi laid out his intentions in a Facebook post, saying the military would keep pushing forward while promising to level with the public.

“There is a difficult task ahead, so we are not making loud promises,” he wrote. “We are working with responsibility for our decisions and for the people who hold the front line and help Ukraine stand firm.”

Russia downplayed Drapatyi’s talk, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying he did not expect the change to alter anything on the battlefield, claiming Russian forces remain on the offensive across the front, and adding that “Kyiv’s regime is trembling from within.” Moscow was not done there. State outlets in Russia said prosecutors put out an arrest warrant on Drapatyi within hours of him getting the job.

This all comes as Drapatyi is the third person to hold the job since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, and he represents a new crop of commanders who came up after the Soviet era and have embraced a tech-heavy approach to the war, including the “drone line,” a kill zone near the front packed with attack and surveillance drones.

His appointment followed nearly a week of nationwide protests set off when Zelenskyy fired popular defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, a 35-year-old credited with building the drone strategy that has helped Ukraine hold off a bigger enemy. Fedorov had clashed with Syrskyi, whom some troops nicknamed “The Butcher” over the brutal 2023 battle for Bakhmut, and protesters took the firing as proof that Zelenskyy had picked the entrenched brass over the reformers.

Drapatyi is widely respected in the ranks, and much of that reputation rests on a single decision. As head of Ukraine’s ground forces in 2025, he resigned the same day a Russian missile hit a training center and killed a dozen soldiers, writing that “an army in which nobody is responsible for a loss dies.” He first became a name in 2014, after video spread of him driving an armored vehicle straight through a separatist barricade on his way into Mariupol.