The Guardian reports:

From the elevated deck of his command post, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, the head of Ukraine’s ground forces, peers down with pinched eyes and furrowed brow at the expanse of scrubland and forest laid out in front of him as an assault unit of soldiers seeks to cross a heavily mined field.

It is evident that the general would like a little more speed.

“This isn’t a show,” says Syrskyi. The men running from trench to armoured vehicles are preparing for battle. The scene being played out for the general at a military camp in the east of Ukraine was one of their final exercises – and designed to impress.

“Ordinarily, it would be quicker,” Syrskyi says when asked whether he is content with what he has seen.

He is attentive to the large screens relaying drone footage to the triangular three-decked command post and scrupulously polite to the officers leaning in to earnestly brief him, speaking into his right ear, about the movements of the sappers, tanks and armoured vehicles ranging in front of him.

But there is a restlessness to the general – under six feet tall, slim, but broad at the shoulders and thick in the forearms – as he stands in a huddle of his fellow officers and soldiers under the hot midday sun.

Syrskyi, 57, may be the second most senior army officer in Ukraine behind Valeriy Zaluzhny, the overall commander of the country’s armed forces, but it is on him that many have pinned their hopes of another breakthrough in the war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. [Continue reading…]