Brutal butcher or brilliant general? Meet Ukraine’s top soldier taking the war to Russia

Meat general, “sovok”, “the Butcher of Bakhmut” ...

Many unpleasant things were said about Oleksandr Syrsky when he succeeded Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces in February.

He was too conservative, too controlling, too willing to spend his men’s lives – above all, some Ukrainian soldiers grumbled, too Soviet.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (centre) and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky (right) look at a map while visiting Sumy, Ukraine, in mid-August.Credit: AP

Now, the 59-year-old’s daring invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has shifted that view – up to a point.

Instead of berating him for being stubborn, unimaginative, and sacrificing lives for pointless tactical gains, he is being praised for planning and executing one of the biggest, most audacious, and, so far, most successful surprises of the war.

But this bold, meticulously organised and extremely risky gambit has drawn both admiration and unease.

Mariana Bezuhla, a Ukrainian member of parliament, this week called Colonel General Syrsky the Ukrainian Zhukov – a reference to the general Georgy Zhukov, who led the Red Army to victory over the Nazis.

The compliment was deliberately ambivalent: “Syrsky brings the war to some new level of manoeuvres of the Second World War, where the bets are on the loss or acquisition of entire regions, but what is the price and what are the prospects?” she wrote on X. “I am sure that even he does not have clear answers. It’s a game of all-or-nothing. The surprises are not over.”

Success in Kursk is not free. Ukraine is losing some of its best men in combat there. In Donbas, the Russians have accelerated their advance and are knocking on the door of Pokrovsk.

The coming weeks will tell whether Kursk is a tide-turning masterstroke or a final, terrible blunder.

The outcome may decide the war. It will certainly decide how history remembers Oleksandr Syrsky.

Kursk has already shifted some views of him.

One veteran soldier said: “Among the infantry, he is known as a very conservative, straight tactics guy. I had the same opinion of him as I did before Kursk.

Valery Zaluzhnyi (right), the former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, hugs his successor, Oleksandr Syrsky, in Kyiv in February.Credit: AP

“I’m positively surprised how he managed to keep preparations and first strikes out of the news and Telegram channels.”

His decision to keep the plans secret from western allies, but also much of the Ukrainian military and government, appears to have been vindicated.

Syrsky, like all officers of his generation, is a product of the Soviet military.

Born in 1965 in Vladimir, east of Moscow, he moved to Ukraine as a teenager and studied at Moscow’s Higher Military Command School before starting a military career. On independence, his unit was absorbed into the Ukrainian military.

He was a commander during the Donbas war of 2014, when Russia launched its first invasion, and has been fighting Russians ever since.

By the time of the full-scale invasion of 2022, he was head of the ground forces – effectively second-in-command to General Valery Zaluzhny, the big, grinning, bear-like commander-in-chief beloved of the Ukrainian rank and file.

Under Zaluzhny, he ran both the successful defence of Kyiv in 2022 and the shock blitzkrieg that recaptured Kharkiv region that autumn, two of Ukraine’s greatest victories of the war so far.

So when Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, fell out with Zaluzhny and fired him in February, Syrsky was the logical replacement.

But the costly 10-month defence of Bakhmut, which finally fell to Russia in May last year, was also his.

The high casualties of that battle and his insistence on trying to retake it with a counteroffensive last summer drew bitter criticism.

The ruins of a school in Bakhmut, which was devastated in the war.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Infantrymen felt he was too willing to sacrifice their lives. Strategists felt he was pulling too many valuable resources, including some of Ukraine’s best assault units, away from the main counter-offensive in Zaporizhzhia.

Anecdotes abound of battalion and even company commanders being refused permission to retreat from impossibly exposed positions and taking heavy casualties because of orders from Syrsky.

Micromanagement, disregard for the lives of his own men, a tendency to issue impossible orders, and reluctance to trust officers on the ground. Above all, a refusal to say “no” to political masters demanding unrealistic goals.

For his bitterest critics, those are the traits of a “sovok” (an insulting term for an old-fashioned Soviet-minded person) or worse, Russian, general.

His defenders, however, say those grumbles are wildly unfair.

Syrsky is viewed by those who have worked with him – all the sources for this story insisted on anonymity – as a good manager, methodical in his reasoning and deliberate in his decisions.

He has a reputation for hanging around at the front and for being a hands-on general with direct experience of organising and fighting battles.

No one, his defenders say, has a better understanding of what it takes to make the Russians fail – and if they don’t fail, then to minimise the damage they can do.

They insist that he is no less concerned about his men than any other general. All commanders have had to make decisions that cost lives.

The Ukrainian military is indeed “horribly disorganised”, one source said, and the charge of Soviet thinking is often just cover for resisting his attempts to enforce even the most modest degree of coherence.

Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who led the Red Army into Berlin in 1945.Credit: AP

He is also much sterner than his predecessor, with a firm belief in the virtue of hierarchy and chain of command.

He has a reputation as a workaholic who sleeps little, sets meetings at horribly early hours, has subordinates rather than friends and has no interest in getting people to like him.

In other words, he can be a difficult boss. It is no wonder some people gripe about him.

As for Bakhmut, it was Zelensky who ultimately insisted on holding on there despite the increasing costs.

Syrsky’s respect for hierarchy may have made him more pliable to the president’s wishes than others – and is believed to be one reason Zelensky preferred him to Zaluzhny – but you can’t fault a general for following the instructions of the civilian leadership.

He has defied the critics who call him afraid of innovation. The frontline soldier, who referred to Syrsky as “a bald player” in reference to his thinning hair and conservative tactics, added: “I also know for the past six months to a year, he has been actively engaged in the development of drone systems.

“He is in personal touch with the chiefs of the most effective drone units … apparently he listens to them. That’s one good thing about him.”

Callous, unimaginative meat general, or steely master of manoeuvre? Which of these two wildly different reputations sticks will depend largely on the outcome of the battles in Kursk and Donbas.

What is not in dispute is that Syrsky inherited a bad hand when he took over in February.

The army was exhausted by the failed offensive in Zaporizhzhia, American military aid was frozen, and a political failure to grasp the nettle of conscription had left the armed forces dangerously outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians.

His first big decision was the retreat from Avdiivka in late winter. He has presided over a grinding and demoralising retreat across the Donetsk region ever since.

Until Kursk, the nearest thing he could point to as a victory was the containment of the Russian offensive in Kharkiv region in May.

Even that was marred by the ease with which the Russians crossed the border at the start of that attack. Syrsky faced calls for his resignation as a result.

That adds a political aspect to the current offensive: rumour in Kyiv has it Andri Yermak, Zelensky’s powerful chief-of-staff, was behind the effort to oust him. Some speculate Kursk is partly Syrsky’s attempt to redeem himself.

But even now, he is basically running a damage control operation. The Russians advancing in the east have air superiority that allows them to pound the front with glide bombs and vast numbers of men to sacrifice in assaults on the ground.

Ukraine was hoping to receive F-16s and air defences to tackle the former and more artillery to resist the latter. Neither have yet arrived in sufficient numbers to turn the tide.

It is a predicament Zhukov might recognise.

Syrsky and his men, like the Red Army 80 years ago, rely heavily on Western support to keep up the fight against the invaders.

Not everything can be blamed on Western kit, however. The decision to divert top units to Kursk has clearly weakened the front in Donbas. The risks are huge, and obvious.

Georgy Zhukov also took risks. His triumphs were also costly.

He once told Dwight Eisenhower that on encountering a minefield, he just ordered his infantry to attack as if it wasn’t there. Eisenhower was at once appalled and fascinated: no British or American general would get away with that, he noted.

But he won.

History will judge Syrsky on the same set of scales.

His legacy may be decided in the next few weeks.

The Telegraph, London

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