Oleksandr (Aleksandr) Syrskyi, a career military man and an ethnic Russian who was born and raised in the Vladimir province, located at the heart of Russia in the Volga River basin, has recently become Ukraine’s new army chief after a dramatic military shake-up nearly two years into Russia’s invasion. He has replaced the recently fired Valerii Zaluzhnyi. For the person just appointed to head the Ukrainian Army in its war with Russia, Oleksandr (Aleksandr) Syrskyi has quite a challenging background.

Born on July 26, 1965, in the village of Novinki, Vladimir province, Russian SFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), then in the Soviet Union into a military family of ethnic Russians, Syrskyi trained at the Higher Military Command School in Moscow, the then Soviet capital. After his graduation in 1986, he joined the Soviet Artillery Corps. Syrskyi served in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Czechoslovakia until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. At the time of the collapse of the USSR, he was in Ukraine. In 1993, Syrskyi’s military unit in Chuhuiv was transferred under the Ukrainian command. He swore allegiance to Ukraine and joined the Ukrainian Army.

After that, Syrskyi started climbing the Ukrainian Army career ladder and rose through the ranks to command a regiment, a brigade. As of 2013, he was a major general and a deputy chief of the armed forces’ main command center. When the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014, Syrskyi was appointed as a deputy commander of Ukraine’s defensive operation, known as the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO). Three years later, he took over command. In August 2019, Syrskyi became the head of Ukraine’s Ground Forces, keeping the post when Russia launched a full-scale war against the neighboring country. In spring 2022,........

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