Forty-eight long-range strikes in one month. That was the January 2026 tally Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi gave for Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil and gas sector, and he said they cut overall oil processing in Russia by 19%. The technical reality is that a country short of refined product has a harder time paying for a war, and Zelenskyy has said as much: revenues from oil and gas sales “are used by the Kremlin to fund weapons production for killing Ukrainians.”
The general behind that campaign took the top job on February 8, 2024, when Zelensky replaced Valerii Zaluzhny with him. Zelensky announced it on his Telegram channel that Thursday evening. “The time for renewal is now,” he wrote, and he credited Syrskyi with “successful experience of defence and offence.”
A Soviet education, a Ukrainian career
Syrskyi was born on July 26, 1965, in the Vladimir region near Moscow. He moved to Ukraine at 15 and stayed. His schooling was Soviet: the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School, then the AFU Academy in 1996 and National Defense University in Kyiv in 2005. Before the promotion he ran the Land Forces.
The Donbas war gave him his first public credit. At Debaltseve in 2015 he led the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from near-encirclement, which earned him the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. A year later he commanded the Joint Operational Headquarters, and in 2017 the entire Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east.
Kyiv, Kharkiv and Bakhmut
When the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Syrskyi directed the defense of Kyiv. He ordered bridges destroyed, among them the Irpin River dam and pontoon bridge on February 26, which in the Kyiv Post’s account “flooded Russian army positions and stopped the rapid Russian offensive on Kyiv.” The title Hero of Ukraine followed. He also split the capital and its surroundings into sectors, each under a named general, and let field officers decide tactics without calling headquarters first.
In the fall of 2022 he was a commander in the Kharkiv counteroffensive. Then came Soledar and Bakhmut, where his insistence on pressing on, against the advice of American strategists, drew criticism. He called it “a matter of principle and honor.” The fighting earned the label “Bakhmut Massacre” for its casualties.
Reputations split. Zelensky calls him “the most experienced Ukrainian commander.” The BBC described him as “determined and cunning,” sleeping four and a half hours a night with the gym as his one break. Politico reported that many soldiers privately call him “the butcher.”
The oil campaign
By February 2026 the general was reporting results in the numbers a refinery manager would recognize. Losses to Russia totaled 53.4 million tons annually, he said, from the January strikes alone. Zelenskyy framed the attacks as a reply to Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. A short energy ceasefire had just collapsed after a few days when Moscow broke it. Ukraine had suspended its energy strikes during the pause.
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