Training, honesty about problems inside the force, and a focus on finding the enemy and destroying them were the priorities named by the number two man in the Ukrainian military, Major General Andriy Hnatov, in a rare, wide-ranging interview Tuesday.
In remarks published by the state-run Ukrinform news agency, Hnatov, a 30-year veteran, since March serving as the Chief of the Army General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), said that his country’s military is an organization that has learned to acknowledge imperfections and discuss them, but it’s not always been easy.
“If you compare, for example, the situation when I was a young officer and joined the army – what was the communication like, what were the relationships (within the chain of command) were like – then I can tell you that we have finished a marathon. I believe that now both the leadership and the units are quite open, and (now) we speak openly about successes and failures,” Hnatov said in part.
Hnatov, 45, served most of his career in elite marine units, and in February 2022 was a high-profile commander leading Ukrainian forces fighting in the southern Kherson sector. In March, Hnatov was promoted to head the Army General Staff (AGS), as part of an overhaul of national military leadership replacing older with younger officers, ordered by President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the time, Zelensky said he wanted more experienced combat leaders at the top of the organization.
Six months into his tour as the Ukrainian army’s senior planning officer, Hnatov said that the AFU remains an only partially professional force of career officers and enlisted, along with mobilized civilians still learning how to be soldiers on the job, at times in battle. Improving combat effectiveness takes training and discipline and frank discussion of mistakes, and civilian inclination to be polite and downplay problems doesn’t disappear the moment a Ukrainian citizen puts on a uniform, he said.
“(N)egative situations, of course, arise periodically, whether it is enemy strikes that have resulted in casualties, for example, or some crime committed by a serviceman. And I consider it positive when people understand that the Armed Forces are not some ideal organization, but rather a large, complex structure that is changing, constantly undergoing reform, and at the same time performs difficult combat tasks,” Hnatov said. “It is naive to think that people who were civilians yesterday, engaged in various activities, today they are in uniform in the army, and that they immediately became ideal soldiers, disciplined. And that does not happen, of course. It is a complex process.”
Zelensky, in January comments, said that the AFU, including both military and civilians, numbered around 800,000 service personnel, of whom about 600,000 are deployed against Russian forces invading the east and south of the country.
Hnatov said the AFU is meeting recruitment quotas and able to maintain force strength, and that a relatively stable front has made possible an increase of the length of basic combined arms training for soldiers set to be assigned to combat units from 30 to 51 days, followed by 14 days of additional training at the new soldier’s receiving unit.
Training priorities are driven by frontline experience and focus on marksmanship, first aid, field entrenchment, land navigation, weapons systems, electronic warfare and security and defense against drones, including engaging and destroying them, he said.
“It is very important that a serviceman knows how and is not afraid to fight against air targets (drones) of various types, that he can correctly choose a position, equip it, camouflage himself, that he knows how to observe the battlefield in such conditions, that he knows by what parameters the enemy can expose him at this position and that he knows how to correctly apply improvised means to protect himself,” Hnatov said.
The AFU is moving forward, Hnatov said, with the fielding of and development of tactics for dedicated assault infantry units with the mission of attacking defensive positions like trenches and fortified villages. Enlistment in the assault infantry, a particularly dangerous combat role, is highly selective, and recruits must meet high physical and mental standards, he said.
“This is one of the most difficult infantry tasks – to storm an enemy position or facility, if it is skillfully equipped and well-defended. There are many requirements for such servicemen, starting from the moral and psychological state – there must be special readiness for such actions, ending with practical skills of interaction in a unit, the ability to act in small groups, the ability to act under constant surveillance of enemy drones…assault units have their own training program – they prepare for offensive, assault operations. They are constantly supplied with the necessary modern equipment and weapons,” Hnatov said.
Assault infantry units recruited and trained for that combat job are a relatively recent development in the AFU, with the first sizable formations – regiments of around 1,000 men – reaching battlefields only in spring 2025. The units have generally succeeded at assigned missions and liberated villages and gained ground in operations, most visibly in Russia’s Kursk region and in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Ukraine’s military, in late September, created an assault infantry branch specialization within the AFU.
Hnatov said that he supports increased pay for soldiers, especially in high-risk units like the assault infantry and commandos, and that his office intends to make it a reality. The AFU’s highest pay should be linked to the danger and complexity of the job the soldier is trained to perform, he said.
“Of course, it (high pay for high-risk military jobs) is worth it…work is underway to increase the financial support for military personnel…a lot will depend on the complexity of the profession, on how long a person has to study to obtain his specialty. Obviously, for military personnel performing less complex tasks, pay should be lower than for, for example, a navigator or an F-16 pilot, who needs to study a lot and has stringent health requirements to do that job,” Hnatov said.