66th Brigade Commander Krot: I don't want some latte-swilling guy judging my actions in front of the whole country

On 15 September, after several months of keeping it quiet, Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps announced Operation Vivaldi, a major offensive operation on the Lyman front.

The operation involves mopping up Russian troops that have infiltrated deep into Ukrainian positions and cutting off a sizeable Russian salient west of the Chornyi Zherebets River.

The salient had been expanding for two years, gradually encircling Lyman and looming over Sviatohirsk. Allowing it to keep growing would have put several areas at risk – the town of Izium in Kharkiv Oblast and the Kramatorsk agglomeration, widely regarded as Ukraine's last "fortress belt" in Donetsk Oblast.

One of the brigades involved in the initial stages of Operation Vivaldi was the 66th Separate Mechanised Brigade named after Mstyslav the Brave.

The 66th advanced from west to east and liberated at least two settlements that have been publicly confirmed – Serednie and Shandryholove (we don't yet have the complete list).

Interestingly, the brigade did not simply storm the two villages head-on. Serednie was partially blockaded before being mopped up. Shandryholove was encircled and brought under complete fire control, and it was only after a period of siege had demoralised the Russian troops that Ukrainian forces moved in to mop it up.

A few days ago, Ukrainska Pravda had an exclusive opportunity to work on the Lyman front, where we spoke to Rostyslav "Krot" ("Mole") Sylivakin, commander of the 66th Brigade.

In this interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Sylivakin explains how his brigade managed to retake one settlement without suffering a single casualty, whether Operation Vivaldi is really changing the balance of forces in Donetsk Oblast, how the 3rd Army Corps treats his brigade despite it not being one of the corps' original units, and why he hates giving interviews, yet still spent two hours with Ukrainska Pravda journalists at his command post.

Secrets of Operation Vivaldi

Your brigade has been deployed on the Lyman front since 2022 – longer than any of the brigades currently operating here. Can you take us back a year or two and explain what was happening here before Operation Vivaldi? Where was the line of contact?

At the start of the operation, the official front line ran near Serednie – a village we later liberated. But Russian groups had penetrated even further. They had infiltrated as far as the outskirts of Korovii Yar [5 km north-west of Serednie – ed.]. So during the preparatory stage of the operation, we had to mop up those infiltrating groups, stabilise the situation, and prevent the Russians from capturing Korovii Yar. We succeeded.

We then seized the high ground overlooking Serednie, followed by the northern part of the village and then its centre, effectively encircling the Russian troops inside the settlement. That enabled us to eliminate all the Russian troops who had infiltrated onto our side of the Nitrius River.

We then began offensive operations to capture Shandryholove, which is across the river from Serednie. We crossed the Nitrius, established a bridgehead on the high ground north of Shandryholove and continued advancing through the strips of forest [the brigade continued advancing further east – ed.]. It was only after moving further forward that we began mopping up Shandryholove.

Why did you leave Shandryholove before it had been mopped up and continue advancing? Was that the plan?

It was. We had neither the time nor the personnel to mop up the village at that stage. We needed to wear the Russians down and demoralise them. And it worked: nine Russian soldiers surrendered, around 15 were killed, and another two, according to the POWs, died of starvation.

A few months ago I was working on a piece about an offensive operation by Ukraine's Air Assault Forces on the Oleksandrivka front, and I can tell you that they used similar tactics. But they ran into problems: Russian troops would emerge from their shelters and attack Ukrainian soldiers as they made their way through the forest strips that hadn't been mopped up yet…

I'm not saying this tactic would be effective on every part of the front. But storming well-fortified positions, and especially mopping up settlements, even small ones, requires far more forces, resources and personnel than simply blocking them and continuing to advance.

It was better for us to first block the enemy and cut them off from the rest of their units so they were unable to bring ammunition and supplies into Shandryholove, and then keep them under observation and fire on them with drones and artillery.

Every time the enemy came out from their cover, we were able to hit them, force them back, and make them feel their situation was hopeless. In time they realised that no one was coming for them – there would be no food or ammunition. We also dropped leaflets on them and played audio recordings over loudspeakers offering them the chance to surrender.

And it worked. An enemy that was prepared to defend their positions just a month earlier eventually breaks and becomes willing to surrender. Especially after eating nothing but roots, clay and worms for four or six weeks...

If we'd tried to mop up Shandryholove without blocking it first, we would have lost a lot of our people.

In your interview with Anna Kaliuzhna, you said you liberated one settlement without suffering a single casualty. Which settlement was that, and how did you manage it?

It was the village of Serednie. We were able to do it first and foremost because of the training our people had received. We were helped enormously by the fact that in February or March 2026 we were given permission to conduct basic combined military training at our own military unit. Because when we got people who'd done their basic training at training centres, they were just as strange to us as those who'd come straight from the enlistment offices. We had to spend time giving them additional training.

Do you remember when fair and regular replenishment of personnel was introduced at the end of 2025?

But they promised 50 people per brigade, didn't they? That's not many.

It isn't, but under those circumstances it was enough for us to prepare people for offensive operations. It gave us some certainty. Based on the battlefield situation and the fact that we would receive 50 people, we decided that we would conduct offensive operations [at the start of Operation Vivaldi – ed.] using small infantry groups of two or three people. A group like that is harder to detect and hit, and it's easier for them to find or dig shelter.

Groups of two or three assault troops? Wait, how many people did you actually have retaking Serednie?

Up to 30 people in total [an astonishingly small number for an offensive operation – UP]. But you can't say it was just those 30 people, because capturing a settlement involves a whole range of measures. To liberate Serednie, we had to capture the strongpoints overlooking the river, establish a safe route to the village, and so on.

We weren't able to block Serednie in the same way we later blocked Shandryholove because the Nitrius River runs along its eastern side. At the time we couldn't cross the river and seize the opposite bank, but we did manage, to some extent, to isolate the village using drones and minimise the number of enemy personnel that went into it.

Did the Russians not engage your men in small-arms combat in Serednie at all? Given that you suffered no casualties there.

Of course they did. There were about 20 enemy troops there. But when planning the operation, we were counting on the element of surprise. Basically our infantry shot the f**kers while they were asleep or resting in their dugouts and completely unaware of what was coming. Of course there were some cases where the enemy put up resistance, but thanks to our training, every small-arms engagement ended in our favour.

Am I right in thinking that this is the second time the Ukrainian army has liberated villages on the Lyman front? Didn't the first offensive operation sweep through here in 2022?

Yes. These territories were liberated, roughly all the way up to Ploshchanka, in autumn 2022. Then, from spring 2024 onwards, we began losing these territories. The enemy's 20th Army launched a large-scale offensive here, and our forces were weakened and stretched thin because everyone was fighting on higher-priority fronts – in Bakhmut, near Avdiivka.

Serednie and Shandryholove, the villages we're talking about, were lost in the autumn and winter of 2025.

A Ukrainian tank in a liberated village on the Lyman front in autumn 2022. Photo: Dmytro Larin

There was a whole combination of reasons why we lost those territories, ranging from incompetence on the part of individual officers at the commander level to decision-making at the group level.

In my view, another major factor was the mixing of units. In summer 2024, the 66th Brigade's sector was 38 km long [this is a huge sector – UP] and in addition to five of our own, 15 other attached battalions were fighting in it. For a single brigade, that's far too many attached units – untrained, understaffed, and originating from various structures ranging from Territorial Defence to border guards.

"I don't like it when every commander who gets an interview talks about how great he is"

You've emphasised several times that you aren't particularly keen to give interviews. I've heard a lot of military personnel say that. Why is that?

I don't like it when every commander who gets an interview talks about how great he is, giving expert assessments of what other commanders or other units have done without having the relevant experience to do so. And then there's the principle that the more frequently a person is interviewed, the faster they're made a Hero of Ukraine.

In normal armies in the rest of the world, it doesn't work like that. Press officers comment on events, not commanders. The commanders lead the troops.

From my point of view, I have to say that for us as journalists, it's an immense privilege to be able to speak with commanders directly and not just with press officers.

In our country and in our army, it's something we have to do, because service members and the Armed Forces as a whole have had a pretty poor reputation since 2014. There's a widespread stereotype that commanders are butchers, bribe-takers and incompetent fools and every other soldier is an alcoholic or a drug addict. So we need to promote the army and improve our reputation.

But some commanders exploit this carte blanche they have in terms of interviews and media exposure to satisfy their personal ambitions and become famous. From a professional standpoint, this is inappropriate. It leads to a situation where any young lad in this country can sit in front of a camera and deliver expert evaluations of decisions made by generals and colonels.

Personally, I don't want my actions and decisions to be judged later by some latte-swilling fella who's never been in my shoes.

I don't think that General Syrskyi deserves to have his decisions and actions judged by a generation this young, privileged and superficial – people who have experienced little beyond lattes, consumerism and sexual experimentation. Still less does he deserve to be judged publicly, before the whole of Ukraine.

Or even those colonels who've made sure they get interviews but have never served as group commanders – they sit there and criticise decisions made by Syrskyi or Zaluzhnyi, and in the future they'll criticise Drapatyi's decisions. Assessment and criticism should only come from people who have the necessary competence, relevant experience and level of training.

Remember Oleksandr "Henii" Shyrshyn – in the summer of 2025, when he was serving as a battalion commander in the 47th Brigade, he posted on Facebook saying the tasks set by the top leadership were "idiotic"...

Henii was criticising a specific situation and tasks in which he was directly involved. Henii was not criticising the commander-in-chief's overall activities across the Armed Forces or decisions made with regard to other sectors and other commanders.

So that form of criticism is acceptable?

The reason that criticism was expressed publicly was because it hadn't worked at the level where Henii initially raised his concerns and proposed alternative courses of action – it had been ignored.

I know Henii as a completely capable and effective commander.

Personnel audit, relationship with 3rd Army Corps and expectations of Drapatyi

When you took over in 2024, the 66th Brigade was in a pretty bad way: exhausted, understaffed and suffering losses. How did you handle that situation? What advice would you give to those in a similar situation today or in the future, especially considering that new brigades continue to be created, such as the 167th?

First of all we had to figure out what kind of personnel we actually had and what we didn't. Remember, we had 15 attached units at the time and only a handful of them were fighting independently. Most had minimal training, lacked proper combat experience, and were fundamentally unable to fight independently. So step one was to determine the true state of the personnel.

Then we did a huge amount of work to form a good, effective team with the right moral values. Some unit commanders had to be removed.

What are the right values to you?

First, zero tolerance for corruption. Second, openness and honesty. And third, you could be melodramatic and say the value of human life, but to be honest, it's the pursuit of efficiency.

In any interview you listen to these days, all the commanders talk about human life being the top priority. That is undoubtedly true. But if the command is incompetent, it doesn't matter how much they value human life – they're not going to preserve it.

The only way you can value human life in the conditions of our war is through high-quality training, high standards and discipline. There is no other way. If you're constantly shielding the lives of your own soldiers, your neighbours to the left and right of you are going to suffer. If you protect your own people all the time, someone else is going to get killed. If we run away from every danger, then I'm sorry, but tomorrow the front line is going to be beyond the Dnipro.

I think the very fact that we took the decision, as a society and as a country, to fight and not surrender in 2022 means we fundamentally agreed that for us, Ukraine's existence stands higher than any single human life.

Putin said in an interview that he does not see a world without Russia – the same must hold true for Ukraine, for Ukrainians. There are no Ukrainians without Ukraine.

So first you conducted a sort of personnel audit, then you assembled a team with the right values?

Assembling a team is a lengthy process – it can't be done in a week or two. That process continues to this day and will continue for as long as I am in this position. I found all the battalion commanders right here within the brigade – I didn't bring anyone in from outside or pull in any friends or acquaintances. I observed them for six months and found them, and we are learning here together and developing our brigade.

I get a sense from your words that you're a supporter of the corps reform, even though your 66th Brigade is fighting in another corps. I'd like to ask: how does the 3rd Army Corps treat you as an attached brigade?

The 3rd Corps treats our attached brigade as if we were their own (smiling).

To put it in simple terms and briefly, to start with, the 3rd Corps helped us to complete missions with their own personnel so that we had time to train our new recruits and non-commissioned officers. This ensured that we didn't deploy them chaotically, but according to plan – so that people could first gain combat experience in defence, and then we could train specialised groups to eliminate infiltrated enemy forces and conduct assault operations.

[According to UP's information, Andrii Biletskyi ordered the allocation of well over a thousand soldiers from the 3rd Assault Brigade to reinforce the brigades that joined the newly formed corps and its operational control.]

Prior to the corps reform, those types of decisions didn't happen. If any units were sent to reinforce us, they were mostly understrength. Firstly, they couldn't really reinforce us much, and secondly, they'd arrive when it was already too late.

The 3rd Corps also evaluated our brigade's capabilities very quickly and objectively. Their groups visited our units and observed the commanders and our supply levels. They provided training wherever possible, helping us restructure our command and control system.

I understand that this includes introducing a role known as a "battle captain" – a dedicated person who directs combat operations in real time from the command post? I saw some last year at 13th Khartiia Brigade command posts, and it looked very unusual.

Yes, the 3rd Army Corps helped us introduce this system. Before that, the entire burden of managing ongoing combat operations fell on the brigade commander and his deputies. As a result, we were falling behind in every area of our work, particularly when it came to planning future operations. Now we have time to plan, develop our capabilities and so on.

So if you didn't have a battle captain now, we wouldn't be sitting here recording this interview? Would you be next door in the main command room, watching a live drone feed on a big TV and shouting "Open fire!" into the radio?

Yes. When I took command of the 66th Brigade, what it boiled down to was that either I or one of my deputies would be sitting in front of a screen shouting orders about who should fire where, which drone should go where, where to put the mortar and where to put the machine gun. This is called hands-on control or micromanagement, and it has never been effective anywhere. I knew perfectly well even then that this wasn't how things should work.

I'd been a company commander and a battalion commander. For example, at the 93rd Brigade, I was taught that every commander must make decisions within their own remit. When I was a company commander, I didn't tell section commanders what to do – I expected them to make decisions themselves. If I wasn't happy with their decision, I'd adjust it and guide them towards a better one.

At the 66th Brigade, we had to start from scratch and teach commanders to make their own decisions. I spent a lot of time on that.

By 2025, when the corps reform began, my battalion commanders had become fairly independent. I no longer needed to sit in front of a screen all the time shouting orders. But I didn't have a dedicated officer who could take over that role.

The 3rd Army Corps showed us how battle captains should operate. It sent its own battle captains to our command posts to train us and share their experience. That had a positive effect. Now, other brigades are coming to us to learn.

How did you let go of the need for constant control? I've written more than one article about what micromanagement in the military was like under Oleksandr Syrskyi. And as someone who has managed at least something in life – even a tiny team working on a tiny task – I understand how difficult it can be.

It's not a question of how I let go. I never intended to hold on to that kind of control in the first place. I'd been a company commander and a battalion commander; I'd had my fill of directing small infantry groups. I don't want to be doing the same things as a brigade commander that I did when I was a company commander.

It's simple: any reasonably sensible person will be too lazy to do someone else's job.

My job is to appoint effective leaders, train them, hold them to high standards and give them the autonomy they need to make decisions. I will only make decisions on their behalf if those decisions contradict my intentions or if, based on my experience and training, I can see that they won't lead to the task being carried out effectively. That's how it works.

The system should work, not rely on one person.

On the subject of micromanagement, our sources say the new commander-in-chief is trying to move away from this kind of command system. Have you noticed any changes in the military since Mykhailo Drapatyi took over?

I'd put it this way: it's too soon for anyone at brigade level to have felt the effects of the change of commander-in-chief. The appointment can't be evaluated solely on the basis that I've asked the commander-in-chief about a few specific issues and he's agreed to help me. [Our sources say that Sylivakin has a fairly good relationship with Drapatyi – UP.]

But I believe that over time our defence forces will undergo major systemic changes, particularly when it comes to micromanagement. I know that General Drapatyi wants to build effective teams at every level, made up of competent people and officers, and root corruption out of the Armed Forces.

"There will be no wars without living people taking part"

How has Operation Vivaldi affected the defence of Donetsk Oblast as a whole? Has it really changed the situation fundamentally?

Operation Vivaldi will at the very least force the Russians to ease the pressure on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, because they will have to redeploy reserves from there [to the Lyman front] to stop us from advancing further.

Secondly, it's a massive blow to the Russians' illusion that they are already in the final stages of this war. Their media keeps claiming that Sviatohirsk has been captured, that Oskil [a village 10 km east of Izium] has been encircled, or that they are already storming Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The successes of Operation Vivaldi are tearing their whole "victory" narrative to shreds.

It's unlikely, of course, but maybe some ordinary Russians will eventually realise that they are still a very long way from capturing Donbas.

They're a long way from capturing Donetsk Oblast at the moment, but could they still manage it?

We're fighting a huge country with an effectively inexhaustible pool of manpower for mobilisation. With those resources, the Russians can achieve anything they want. The question is whether they are capable of doing so with their current approach. I don't believe they are.

Personally, I don't think losing one territory or another would be a huge catastrophe for us. The war will go on for years, and the decisive factors in the final outcome will be things such as the combat effectiveness and technological development of the Armed Forces.

We may lose some territory, but if we preserve our combat effectiveness and develop faster than the Russians, we will be able to liberate that territory later.

Why are you confident that training and developing the Ukrainian Armed Forces can offset Russia's numerical superiority?

The clearest example is 2022, during this very war, when their numerical advantage was reduced to nothing because our units were more experienced. In 2022, Ukraine was technologically more advanced than Russia. Some of our companies already had Mavic drones and FPV drones, which had become available thanks to enthusiasts who had figured out how to use them on their own.

There will be many more technological innovations during this war. The question is which side will be quicker to adopt them and scale them up.

Like two-metre-tall humanoid robots?

That's possible too. When I was just beginning to gain combat experience, I couldn't have imagined that one day I'd be adjusting artillery fire with a drone and using that same drone for reconnaissance. Back then I had to go out on foot to see anything and gather information. And now warfare has changed so much…

There was a time when we couldn't even have imagined that you could kill an enemy by dropping a munition from a drone or evacuate a wounded soldier using a robot. Just six months ago our brigade wasn't using UGVs [unmanned ground vehicles] at all. Now we're consistently among the top 10 most effective units in terms of UGV use. And this month we even built our own UGV.

In the same way, five years from now, humanoid robots might be running through trenches and shooting. But the point is that they too are just a tool, a piece of technology, and they won't remain effective forever. As long as war exists, there will always be a place for ordinary infantry. There will be no wars without living people taking part.

Do you agree that the war has reached a stalemate?

In my opinion, the claim that the war has reached a stalemate is more political than military and isn't entirely accurate. From a military perspective, there are no dead ends in war. Sooner or later, one side will achieve a breakthrough.

If a ceasefire isn't reached politically, the war will continue until one side develops new technological solutions that give it a significant advantage. In the First World War it was chemical weapons and tanks. In the Second World War it was aircraft and new tactics for motorised and mechanised units. There will be something new in this war, too.

Olha Kyrylenko, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska, Anatolii Tereshchenkov and Tetiana Buchkovska

Edited by Teresa Pearce