The burning question of who will become the top military commander under President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been answered. And it has surprised many.
On May 21, the new president issued two decrees to appoint Lieutenant General Ruslan Khomchak as the new Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. Zelenskiy also dismissed General of the Army Viktor Muzhenko, who had served on the post since 2014 under Petro Poroshenko. That pleased the general’s many critics.
But the appointment of Khomchak triggered a loud uproar due to Khomchak’s controversial service record — particularly his role in the disastrous battle of Ilovaisk in August 2014 — and polarized public views on his competency and popularity among military personnel.
Judging by Zelenskiy’s public remarks, his campaign had agreements with potential candidates for top military nominations even before the comedian-turned-politician’s landslide victory in the April 21 runoff election.
Just after the exit polls declared him the winner, Zelenskiy said he would appoint “very serious guys, with authority in the army, the serving generals” to the General Staff.
In the weeks between the election and the May 20 inauguration, rumors posited that several generals could be candidates for the highest post in the Armed Forces, including airborne branch leader Lieutenant General Mykhailo Zabrodskiy and the former top commander of the combined Ukrainian contingent in Donbas, Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev.
But according to the Kyiv Post’s sources in the military, as Zelenskiy’s electoral victory grew increasingly obvious, Khomchak became the most probable next Chief of the General Staff.
Ahead in combat
Khomchak, now 51, started his military career as a cadet at the elite Higher Military Command School in Moscow — the alma mater of many of Soviet and Russian top military generals.
He continued to serve with the Soviet Army contingent in East Germany and later in Soviet Belarus.
In Ukraine’s military, he served as a chief executive officer of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Brigade based in Yavoriv in Lviv Oblast, then headed the 300th Mechanized Infantry Regiment in Chernivtsi, and next led the 72nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade based in Bila Tserkva.
From 2009, he served as a chief executive officer of the 8th Army Corps, which was later transformed into Operative Command South, responsible for the defense of Ukraine’s southern regions.
Lieutenant General Ruslan Khomchak (L) talks to a U.S. Army Major General Michael T. McGuire at a military firing range in Ukraine. (Ministry of Defense of Ukraine )
In 2011, at the age of 44, Khomchak was promoted to major general during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych.
With the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine in Donbas in 2014, Khomchak, already a lieutenant general, became the commander of the so-called Sector B, a group of troops fighting Russia-backed militants west of Donetsk.
This proved a controversial period for Khomchak.
His combat leadership was marked by a number of conflicts with Ukrainian volunteer formations, particularly the Aidar Battalion. It accused the general of refusing to issue firearms and munitions for the battalion’s troops and of banning Aidar from active combat.
The general said he was only arming the personnel that officially joined military formations under his command and didn’t have the right to give firearms to others.
Death trap
In August 2014, General Khomchak was charged with planning and commanding a major operation to take the Ilovaisk area, a key railroad hub in Donetsk Oblast, from Russian-backed militants.
After nearly two weeks of fighting, the Ukrainian forces had partially retaken the city. But then some 1,400–1,700 troops led by Khomchak in the area wound up surrounded by overwhelming Russian regular forces, which had invaded Ukrainian territory, and local Russia-backed militants.
After a failed attempt to break through the encirclement on Aug. 29, 2014, General Khomchak would lead a Ukrainian military convoy withdrawing from the death trap in Ilovaisk through a corridor negotiated with the enemy. But during the withdrawal, the Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian troops in violation of the agreement.
A woman stands by the debris of her house destroyed by shelling in Ilovaisk, 50 Kilometers southeast of Donetsk, on September 4, 2014. (AFP)
As a result, 366 Ukrainian troops were killed, 429 injured, and nearly 300 taken prisoner, according to one of the official investigations into the massacre. For Ukraine, it was the most disastrous loss of the war.
Khomchak, with several dozen troops, reportedly managed to battle his way through the entrapment and survive. But he faced countless public accusations of incompetence in commanding the operation, as did a number of other higher-ranking General Staff officers like Viktor Muzhenko.
In particular, Rostislav Shaposhnikov, an activist with the Road Control project who escaped the Ilovaisk trap with Khomchak, later accused the general of weaseling out of commanding his troops as Russians were slaying the withdrawing Ukrainian convoys.
The general dismissed all these accusations, saying that he didn’t abandon his command and acted as best as he could in the situation, leading out as many troops as possible.
A destroyed tank is seen on the road to Ilovaisk, 50 kilometers east of Donetsk on Sept. 3, 2014. (AFP)
“I could have been killed too,” Khomchak said on May 23 following his introduction ceremony. “In spite of all the negative things said regarding me, I was withdrawing together with those people…”
“Since God saved my life, I must dedicate myself to bringing all possible changes to the army, so as not to let people die.”
Khomchak also frequently said that the massive Russian invasion was the primary cause of the Ilovaisk massacre. Official investigations came to the same conclusion.
Following the battle, Khomchak said that his troops had been fighting against regular Russian airborne and motorized infantry battalion groups in Ilovaisk. At that time, the mass invasion of Ukraine by the regular Russian troops was only just becoming evident.
Official inquiries by a special parliamentary commission and the Prosecutor General’s Office didn’t result in any charges against Khomchak over his performance during the Battle of Ilovaisk.
A number of servicemen formerly under Khomchak’s command also spoke out in the general’s support. For instance, Roman Zinenko, a veteran of the volunteer Dnipro Battalion, gave strongly positive feedback on Khomchak’s leadership during the massacre in his book “The War That Never Happened,” published in early 2019.
Icy reception
Khomchak served as chief of staff of the Ground Forces of Ukraine, and was in charge of all combat formations deployed to Donbas in August-October 2016. In early 2017, he was appointed chief inspector general of the Defense Ministry. He served in this role at the time of several disastrous fires at military depots in 2017–2018, in which tens of thousands of tons of munitions were lost.
Most military officers polled by the Kyiv Post were rather skeptical of Khomchak’s nomination as the new chief of General Staff, citing his unpopularity among military personnel, particularly due to Ilovaisk, and his allegedly unprogressive views and approaches to military command and control.
Speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to comment publicly, a high-ranking General Staff officer characterized Khomchak’s appointment as “getting back to the USSR.”
“In other words, the ‘new faces’ (promised by Zelenskiy) are astonishing,” the officer said, sarcastically.
Others were also skeptical.
Khomchak “is definitely not the best person to be nominated for chief of General Staff,” retired General Staff Colonel Oleh Zhdanov told the Kyiv Post. “(He is) a person with such a long history of murky cases, namely the Ilovaisk operation and his long feud with Muzhenko regarding who was more responsible for that — they were trying to cast the blame on each other.”
Zhdanov added that Khomchak’s battlefield activities weren’t of the “strategic level of command” and didn’t give him experience of conducting top-level operations.
‘Fight to the last ditch’
However, Zhdanov added, despite all the controversies surrounding General Khomchak, his leadership could be used by the Zelenskiy administration to rid the Armed Forces command of those loyal to Muzhenko, Khomchak’s bitter rival.
“In this context, Knomchak’s candidacy could be not a bad choice,” he said. “But, then again, this must be only for an interim period prior to a (true) reform of the Armed Forces. We will need a good, strong, strategically thinking chief of General Staff to assume this reform — although I unfortunately still do not see any tendencies from president Zelenskiy and his team to reveal any military reform plan.”
A Ukrainian serviceman comforts a woman as he and others pay their respects to comrades killed during the 2014 battle which took place in a small town near Donetsk known as the battle of “Ilovaisk kettle”, during a memorial ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the battle in Kyiv on August 29, 2015. (AFP)
But there was also some positive reaction.
Andriy Teteruk, a lawmaker with the 81-seat People’s Front parliamentary faction and former commander of the volunteer Myrotvorets Battalion. was among those who survived the Ilovaisk trap. He said on May 21 he was “acclaiming this decision.”
On his Facebook page, the veteran told a story of his meeting with Khomchak during the Russian massacre and dismissed allegations that the general was a coward.
“I was thinking that, if we were taken prisoner, the generals would be swiftly swapped, while I, as a volunteer battalion leader, would be cut in pieces,” Teteruk said. “So in order to ascertain if everyone was going to fight the enemy in case of engagement,
I asked a straight question: ‘Are you fighting or should I go on separately?’ Khomchak’s reply was immediate and clear:
‘Everyone’s got a weapon — fight to the last ditch, we’re not surrendering. This is how an understanding comes about at the frontline: who can be relied upon and who cannot,” Teteruk said.
Speaking for the first time as a top military officer on May 23, Khomchak said his primary task was to ensure “saving lives and the health of military personnel.”
“This is what must be a foundation for all command and control decisions in (the war zone of Donbas) and beyond it: a human being is the greatest value.”
Khomchak said he would end the practices of “manual control, double standards, total showing off, and wishful thinking” in Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
