Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny on the cover of Time. Here's what the general told the magazine about himself and the war — in brief

He considered the Chief of the Russian General Staff to be “the smartest of men”

Valeriy Zaluzhny was born in 1973 and dreamed of becoming a comedian as a child. But instead, he continued the family tradition by enrolling in the Odessa Command School. His diploma was devoted to the structure of the US Army. But he also respected the Russian school of military science. Zaluzhny read all the works of the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valeriy Gerasimov and considered him “the smartest of people.” “I grew up on Russian military doctrine and I still believe that all military science is in Russia,” Zaluzhny told Time.

He rose from platoon commander to commander of troops in Donbas after the annexation of Crimea. He was invited to lead the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2021. He was stunned: at that time, his rank and status did not correspond to the post. In addition, in 2020, tests of American Javelin missiles under his leadership ended badly, and he was sure that in the presidential office he would be remembered as a “loser with faulty Javelins.” But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted change in both the civilian and military spheres.

Zaluzhny was one of those officers who believed that a full-scale Russian invasion was only a matter of time. When he took over the Ukrainian Armed Forces, he allowed commanders to open fire without waiting for the go-ahead from their superiors. “We needed to discourage them from attacking. We needed to show our teeth,” Zaluzhny explained. Before the war, the Ukrainian army secretly redeployed its equipment. The commander-in-chief wanted the enemy to think that in Ukraine they “smoke weed, watch TV, and post on Facebook .”

On the morning of February 24, Zaluzhny had two goals. First, to hold Kyiv. Second, to lure the Russian army deep into the country and take advantage of its weak supply lines. By the sixth day of the war, he realized that his strategy was working, and that Russian commanders had “simply driven their soldiers into the slaughter.” Then came Russia’s retreat from the Kyiv and Chernigov regions, and six months later, the liberation of the Kharkov region. But Zaluzhny had been preparing for a long battle from the start. “Our victory will give us an opportunity to catch our breath and prepare for the next war,” he said.

Time magazine interviewed Valeriy Zaluzhny in June 2022. The publication called it the first interview with the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the beginning of the war. You can read it in full here .

Cover photo: Gleb Garanich / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA