Ukraine’s Armed Forces General Staff has put Lieutenant General Mykhailo Zabrodskiy, the commander of the country’s Airborne Forces, in charge of military operations in the country’s east, Defense Ministry spokesman Andriy Lysenko said on Nov. 9.
According to Lysenko, the supreme command decided to appoint Zabrodskiy due to his “immense experience” of participating in the war in the Donbas and in “planning military operations of various kinds.”
Lysenko said the high-ranking airborne general takes over the position from Lieutenant General Oleksandr Lokota. Previously, Ukraine’s military said the decision to appoint Zabrodskiy as commander of the army operation in the Donbas coincided with the fact that two elite paratrooper units, the 95th and the 79th brigades, had been redeployed to the war zone.
Zabrodskyi, 44, was born in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. In 1989-1994, he trained as a paratrooper in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and later served in Russian army as a contract officer for five years.
In 1999 he returned to Ukraine and joined the 95th Airmobile Brigade, one of Ukraine’s most prestigious army forces, as a platoon commander. Later, in 2005-2009, Zabrodskiy received advanced training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
On his return from the United States, he was appointed to the command of Ukraine’s military contingent in Kosovo. By early 2013, Zabrodskiy took command of the 95th Airmobile Brigade and was engaged in combat from the very start of Russia’s war in the Donbas in 2014.
Together with his paratroopers, Zabrodskiy participated in the early battles of the war for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, which ended with Russian-led forces leaving the occupied cities and retreating to Donetsk and Horlivka to the south.
Under his command, the 95th Brigade made a sortie informally known as “Zabrodkiy’s Raid” between July 19 and August 10, 2014. During the sortie, a force of 400 of the brigade’s best soldiers marched for 470 kilometers through the war zone at the height of the hostilities, along the front line between the cities of Slovyansk and Mariupol, and further north along the Russian-Ukrainian border.
As a result of the raid, the paratroopers, in cooperation with other army forces, broke the encirclement of at least 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and captured 250 vehicles from Russian regular troops and Kremlin proxy forces. During the raid the Ukrainian force was shelled by Russian artillery from across the border.
Philip Karber, the president of the Potomac Foundation, a U.S. national security policy think tank, has said Zabrodkiy’s raid is one of the longest and most effective land-based combat sorties in modern military history.
President Petro Poroshenko awarded Zabrodskiy the title of Hero of Ukraine on Aug. 23, 2014. Since then, Zabrodskiy has been planning and commanding military operations in the Donbas. He was made the commander of Ukraine’s Airborne Forces in March 2015.
