National Interest

by Clara Kaluderovic

The special operations commander behind Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign now runs its defense ministry. Will his skills match the moment

    Evgeniy Khmara wears a bracelet. Each link carries the name of a brother in arms who did not come back from this war. He said nothing about it until I asked, over dinner in Kyiv this month and only then explained what the links meant. It is worth knowing what the new defense minister of Ukraine carries on his wrist into every meeting where the consequences for his country are decided.

    Consider the split screen of the past week in Kyiv. On August 18, Mykhailo Fedorov—the popular former defense minister whose dismissal in July set off the largest wartime protests since the summer of 2025—posted a video calling for Ukraine to find a way to hold elections during the war, the first such demand from a major political figure since the full-scale invasion began and one widely read in Kyiv as laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign.

    The next morning, Ukraine’s Parliament confirmed Khmara as minister of defense by a constitutional majority. He had resigned his commission as a major general the day before, to satisfy the law’s requirement that a civilian lead the ministry and took the oath with a characteristically unadorned promise: more Ukrainian weapons and more precise strikes.

    One man left the defense debate for politics. The other took an oath to run the war. Nearly all the attention followed the first man out the door. But with the confirmation vote behind him, the more useful question is no longer whether Khmara deserves the job but rather who is the man of the hour—and whether his skills, expertise and strategic judgment fit this particular moment of the war.

    On paper, Khmara is the consummate special operations officer: commander of the elite Alpha Group of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Service and then head of the service itself. While he was still leading the SBU’s Special Operations Center, his units took part in Operation Spiderweb in June 2025—a multi-layered operation involving many parts of the service, of which Khmara’s unit carried out one stage: its operators controlled the drones that struck Russia’s strategic aircraft at air bases thousands of miles from Ukraine. Around $1 million worth of drones inflicted more than $5 billion in damage to Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. This is a loss that Moscow cannot quickly repair or replace.

    In person, there is nothing of the door-kicker about Khmara. He is modest, articulate and unhurried, with an understated charm and a habit of answering questions by widening them—a query about a raid becomes a reflection on leadership; a question about weapons becomes one about people. Former colleagues describe a commander who spent most of his time at or near the front—a big-picture thinker, a quick learner, continually curious—and the respect he commands across the force is not the manufactured kind. Many generals claim as much. The difference is that the soldiers Khmara commanded appear to believe him.

    Those instincts matter more than they might seem, because the job he now holds is, at its heart, a trust-and-systems job. Ukraine’s defense minister does not command troops; he builds the machine behind them—procurement, industrial coordination, budgets, personnel, the politics between institutions. And this is where Khmara’s record is most persuasive. The Alpha Group’s personnel constitute a minuscule portion of Ukraine’s armed forces. Still, it is credited with a wildly disproportionate share of the damage inflicted on Russia—by the service’s own accounting, up to 20 percent of all enemy infantry casualties.

    More telling is what happened to the Russian oil industry in the seven months he ran the SBU: Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian refining matured under him in scale, tempo and logic. Kyiv’s General Staff now assesses that nearly 43 percent of Russia’s refining capacity has been knocked out. Independent estimates are more conservative, but Russia’s own statistics recorded a double-digit drop in refined petroleum output this year and one of the world’s largest oil producers is now importing fuel and rationing gasoline. In large part, this is the result of the campaign Khmara helped oversee.

    The signature of that campaign is its accounting. Khmara has articulated a doctrine of ruthless cost asymmetry—strike operations whose cost runs to roughly 2 percent of the economic damage they inflict, aimed not at individual facilities but at the nodes of a system: refineries, transport hubs, export routes, the third of Russian industrial revenue that feeds the Russian army. Over dinner, he framed the philosophy as a moral distinction as much as an operational one: Russia strikes what terrorizes civilians; Ukraine strikes what finances the war. Listening to him, one notices that he thinks in ratios—the cost of a strike against the damage it inflicts, the price of a drone against the price of a bomber. It is a useful cast of mind for his new job. A defense ministry is, at bottom, a machine for allocating scarce things—money, equipment, people, risk—and Khmara has spent the past several years making exactly those allocations, under fire.

    He will not be doing it alone and the pairing may matter as much as the appointment. Ukraine’s new commander in chief of the armed forces, Mykhailo Drapatyi, was appointed at the same time in the summer’s leadership reshuffle. Energetic and demanding, professional but adaptable, he is regarded across the ranks as the model of a new-generation commander: one who pushes authority downward, welcomes initiative from below and measures success in soldiers’ lives preserved rather than meters gained.

    When a Russian missile struck a training ground last year and killed men under his command, he publicly took responsibility and submitted his resignation, remarking that an army where no one answers for its losses is dying from within. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accepted the resignation but later promoted him to the position of commander of the joint forces (equivalent to commander-in-chief). The soldiers did not forget the gesture.

    Defense Minister Khmara and General Drapatyi come from the same operational culture—forward-leaning and allergic to Soviet-style centralization—and they arrive without the mutual grievances that divided their predecessors. They are already jointly planning the next phase of carrying the war onto Russian territory. Khmara, for his part, refuses to treat the minister-commander relationship as a personality question at all: a shared vision, he argues, saves soldiers’ lives and the cost of its absence is paid at the front.

    None of this makes the job easy. The ministry is a vast bureaucracy and Khmara has never run anything of its administrative breadth—a point he concedes readily. But his theory of the role is suited to its actual limits. “We cannot directly create tech,” he told me; the state’s task is to create the conditions under which people adopt and improve technology, on a battlefield that reinvents itself every few months.

    On mobilization, the issue that consumed his predecessor, he rejects sloganeering: People volunteer when they believe both that they will make an impact and that they will live. Improve the conditions of service and the desire to serve follows. And on strategy, he is unsentimental: A small Soviet army cannot beat a large Soviet army. Ukraine has to create its own method of fighting. Spiderweb is what that method looks like.

    Ukraine has always seen tragedy, he says; its history is a long inventory of it. What separates this generation from all the ones before is that it has a real chance to defeat the enemy. The new defense minister wants to win—and he has his own vision for how to do it. Part of that vision is America: he speaks of the relationship the way soldiers speak of one another—as a brotherhood, made stronger by what each brings to it.

    Fedorov has taken his case to the public and, if he gets his way, to the ballot. That is his right and the debate he has opened about wartime democracy is a real one. But while Ukraine debates, the two men who took over its military leadership this summer will run the war—and on the evidence so far, the country’s friends have reason to expect a great deal from both of them.