In an old interview, Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief Mykhailo Drapatyi said Russia ‘has no right to exist’
Mykhailo Drapatyi, Ukraine’s newly appointed commander-in-chief, said in a 2023 interview that he considers Russia “a nation, along with its leadership, that has no right to exist.”
The YouTube channel Ukrainer W recorded the interview as part of a documentary project on Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade, but didn’t post the full conversation with Drapatyi until the evening of July 22.
The host asked Drapatyi about the mood among servicemen in 2014, when Crimea was annexed and fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine.
“At the beginning, to be honest, there may have been some fear because everything was so uncertain — what was going to happen, how it would happen,” Drapatyi said. “But in the end, we’ve seen the result. You can’t even call them a neighbor. This is a nation, along with its leadership, that has no right to exist. Nothing civilized has changed there over millennia, neither in their mentality nor in their imperial ambitions.”
According to Drapatyi, even before 2014 he “suspected that war was inevitable” because, after 1991, when Ukraine gained independence, the country’s policies were not aimed at achieving complete independence from Russia.
In the same interview, he also said that the Donetsk and Luhansk regions had, “throughout their history,” received too little attention in terms of Ukrainization, leading to the emergence of what he described as a segment of the population that lacked a Ukrainian national consciousness.
Drapatyi argued that many people in those regions did not want to work but instead wanted “something for nothing,” and that they were “mostly indifferent to which country they lived in or what it was called.” He said he reached that conclusion after speaking with local residents.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced July 21 that he had dismissed Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, replacing him with Mykhailo Drapatyi, who had commanded the Joint Forces of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
Drapatyi began his military career in the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, based in Bila Tserkva, in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. In 2014, he led the 2nd Mechanized Battalion, which fought in eastern Ukraine.
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