A field commander decorated for bravery and serving in one of Ukrainian Ground Force’s premier assault units quit his job on Saturday because, he said, the orders military leadership has been giving him are stupid and they are getting his men killed for no reason.
“I have never received more stupid missions than in the current sector (Russia’s Kursk region),” said Maj. Oleksandr Shirshyn in a rare public criticism of Ukraine’s Armed Forces (AFU) senior leadership by a fighting officer.
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“The loss of people was stupid, who are terrorized by clueless generalship that leads to nothing but failures. All they (top army leaders) are capable of is reprimands, investigations, imposition of penalties. Everything is going to Hell,” Shirhsyn wrote in comments published on his personal Facebook page.
Shirshyn, 29, is best known to the Ukrainian public as a multiple degree university graduate joining a crack paratrooper unit shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and becoming a high-profile combat leader with a reputation for tactical skill and caring for his men.
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A multiple medal winner for wounds received and bravery in combat, Shirshyn has been profiled in Ukrainian media as a new generation army officer competent at modern warfare and without links to Soviet military traditions. He received a master’s degree from the Ukrainian Catholic University’s Institute of Leadership and Management, following course work and research in Poland.
The unit Shirshyn quit, the 1st Battalion, 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, is an assault unit raised in early 2023. AFU leadership staffed the unit with hand-picked personnel and armed it with high-quality American weaponry. When the 47th was committed to combat in June 2023 it was badly cut up in frontal attacks against prepared Russian defenses.
Top-level Ukrainian AFU leadership has not learned from those mistakes and, in recent operations in Russia’s Kursk region, once again the 47th was thrown against Russian fortifications to take unnecessary and heavy losses, because headquarters officers in Kyiv wanted to report the capture of useless ground to their superiors, Shirshyn charged.
“Everything is going to Hell. ‘Political’ games [at headquarters] aren’t an assessment of the real state of affairs. That [sort of thing] does not match reality or what can be realistically achieved. They [the AFU leadership] are playing games,” he said.
Ukraine’s General Staff responded to Shirshyn’s accusation with uncharacteristic speed, issuing a Sunday statement that the General Staff had formed a working group “to comprehensively study the circumstances set forth in the publication of the commander of the unit of the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade on social networks.”
“Orders and instructions received from different levels of military command will be analyzed in detail separately for the appropriateness of the decisions made in the current combat situation. Appropriate decisions will be made based on the results of the [investigation],” the General Staff statement said.
Although leadership quality in the AFU has slowly improved over three years of full-scale combat against Russia’s invasion, complaints are widespread in Ukrainian military media and among some soldiers that top level generals are often unwilling or unable to plan battles taking into account new war technologies like FPV drones, instantaneous communications and data-sharing, and issue orders following outmoded Cold War doctrine. Charges that national-level leadership meddles in tactical battles and micromanages field units without understanding the battlefield have dogged the AFU for years.
Military reporter Yury Butusov, one of Ukraine’s most widely read war correspondents, said Shirshyn’s description of recent fighting in the Kursk region was accurate, and that 47th Brigade attack columns suffered heavy losses because they were ordered to drive their armored vehicles into the teeth of ready Russian defenses covered by dense drone swarms.
“The political task of conducting combat operations in enemy territory, which was a Headquarters priority, was poorly organized and planned at the operational and tactical levels. No one is even trying to draw conclusions and learn, but on the contrary, they continue to repeat the same mistakes many times, without counting the losses,” Butusov said in a Sunday web broadcast.
Butusov’s report described Shirshyn as “an intellectual and an educated man” who “always personally took care of the evacuation of the wounded and dead, did everything to reduce losses, for which he enjoyed and enjoys great respect from his fighters. For him, people’s lives and the performance of risky combat missions are not theoretical words, they are actions that he performed himself more than once.”
A Kyiv Post request to the 47th Brigade for comment on Shirshyn’s statement had not been answered at the time this article was published.
In Ukrainian social media, response to Shirshyn’s public attack on the military leadership was strongly positive. Poster Olena Litvin-Leznik commented on Shirshyn’s Facebook page: “I admire your decision! Our system is rotten through and through and is rotting from everyone knows where, and silence and connivance with this system is a crime! Do not be silent, your example will inspire many more commanders and together we will be able to repel the internal enemy – the system!”
The popular Russian mil-blogging duo Dmitriy and Ekaterina Korzin, authors of the 1.2 million-follower pro-Moscow Dva Mayora information platform, said that Shirshyn’s statement was more proof Ukraine’s military is losing.
“Let us remind you that in recent weeks the command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been trying to break through to the village of Tetkino (in Kursk region) with heavy losses in order to capture several kilometers of the Russian border for political purposes,” a Sunday report said.
Ukraine’s crack 3rd Assault Brigade, a formation commanded in large part by younger, new generation officers like Shirshyn, called on soldiers and civilians to stay focused on Ukraine’s main war aim which, in the opinion of the 3rd, is killing and wounding Russian soldiers as efficiently as possible.
“We support the decision of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to create a working group to clarify the circumstances in the 47th Motorized Rifle Brigade… Until the investigation is completed, comments and public discussions of internal conflicts are inappropriate. In wartime, this can be harmful…The war continues. Our enemy is the Russian occupiers. We must continue to fight against them, not against ourselves,” a brigade public statement said.
Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, a former grain trader now commanding 414th Unmanned Aircraft Brigade, according to official statistics the single most lethal combat formation in the AFU, said that charges like Shirshyn’s should be investigated, but that adapting to and winning modern war must always be the top priority.
“The system will be updated, adapted to the challenges and formed into a new doctrine – there is no other way. Moreover, there is no current adapted doctrine (for modern warfare) in the world yet. It is written. With blood,” Brovdi wrote. “Of course, commanders are needed for this. And this war gave birth to those commanders.”
The 2023 Ukrinform Interview with Shirshyn is available here.
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