Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has appointed Lieutenant General Oleksandr Syrskiy to be the new leader of the Joint Forces Operation in the Donbas, replacing the previous commander, Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev, after a year of the latter’s service on the post.
The May 6 appointment came as part of a planned rotation of commanding personnel suggested by Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak and Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Viktor Muzhenko, Poroshenko stated in a post on his Facebook page.
The new commander, General Syrskiy, is not well-known to the public.
During the disastrous Battle of Debaltseve in early 2015, he served as chief executive officer of Sector S of Ukraine’s army contingent — a large group of military formations responsible for the area around the city of Debaltseve in northern Donetsk Oblast and western Luhansk Oblast. In particular, Syrskiy commanded the withdrawal of 4,500 Ukrainian troops from Russian entrapment in the area during a fierce battle.
Additionally, the lieutenant general also created the Bars force team, a troop grouping responsible for providing cover for the withdrawing Ukrainian formations in Debaltseve. After the battle, he was decorated with the 3rd Class Order of Bohdan Khmelnitskiy for his efforts.
In 2016, Syrskiy served as a head of the Operative Headquarters of the Armed Forces and later, in 2017, was appointed a top commander of the whole military campaign in the Donbas.
“(General Syrskiy) has successfully gone though all commanding positions — from squad leader to deputy chief of the General Staff, the post he currently occupies,” Poroshenko said in a recorded speech published on Facebook before Ukrainian troops in the city of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk Oblast, some 600 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
Poroshenko declared the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) on April 30, 2018. The JFO would be completely controlled by the military, rather than the SBU security agency, and would replace the so-called “Anti-Terror Operation” (commonly abbreviated as ATO) against Russian-backed militants in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, which was declared in April 2014.
General Nayev became the first JFO commander, with direct control of all formations of the Armed Forces, the National Guard, the Border Guards, and the police deployed to the Donbas. Beyond that, the JFO commander was given exceptional authority to regulate freedom of movement for civilians in the embattled region without declaring a state of emergency or martial law.
Nonetheless, despite the change in administration, the Ukrainian-controlled half of the region, which is divided by a 450-kilometer front line, saw almost no tangible changes in terms of everyday civilian life.
According to an address by Nayev published on May 2, over the past year, JFO forces managed to regain control over nearly 24 square kilometers of no man’s land between the lines, including the villages of Vilniy, Pivdenne, and Shumy without violating the Minsk Agreements, the international ceasefire signed in February 2015.
