Ukraine's new defense minister wears his war on his wrist. Yevhenii Khmara's bracelet carries, on each of its chains, the engraved name of a comrade who did not come back from the war, The National Interest reported.
Khmara took over the Defense Ministry on 19 August, replacing Mykhailo Fedorov, whose July dismissal set off nationwide protests. He came to the job from the SBU, Ukraine's Security Service, which he had led for seven months when Ukraine's campaign against Russian oil refining reached its widest scale.
He did not volunteer the story
Khmara did not explain the bracelet until a reporter asked him about it over dinner in Kyiv this month. The names now travel with him into the meetings where decisions about Ukraine's defense are made.
He ran the SBU during the oil campaign
Alpha, the SBU's special operations unit, is a tiny share of Ukraine's armed forces, yet the service's own accounting credits it with an outsized share of the damage inflicted on Russia, up to 20 percent of all enemy infantry losses.
More telling is what happened to Russian oil during his seven months in charge of the service. Ukraine's General Staff now estimates that nearly 43 percent of Russia's refining capacity has been knocked out. To a large extent, this is the result of the campaign Khmara helped oversee.
Khmara also developed a doctrine of ruthless cost asymmetry: strike operations designed to cost roughly 2 percent of the economic damage they inflict, targeting not individual facilities but critical nodes within the system.
Khmara insisted that part of the staff of the previous minister stayed
Earlier, Khmara has proposed that the core of the former Defense Ministry team remain in their positions. In particular, this concerns specialists responsible for procurement reform.
Mstyslav Banik, who served as a deputy to Fedorov, confirmed that he was staying on under the newly appointed defense minister. He led a central part of the ministry's modernization and is responsible for implementing the defense procurement reform.
Read also
-
“Zelenskyy is helping Democrats”: Trump’s MAGA base accuses Ukraine of trying to swing US midterms, says journalist in US
-
Russia’s sabotage of Europe should bring Ukraine more weapons through US purchase scheme, with clear statement of where its red lines lie, NATO’s top European commander says
-
Built by Ukraine’s ex-defense minister and unit that wrecked $12 billion of Russian gear, new interceptor downs two jet drones over Kyiv
