Main problems in army are chaos in management, lies in leadership and bloated staffs - Chmut

The head of the Come Back Alive foundation, Taras Chmut, believes that the biggest problems in the Ukrainian army are chaos in management, lies in leadership, as well as bloated staffs.

He spoke about this in an interview with the Ukrainian Pravda publication.

So, Taras Chmut was asked what he sees as the biggest problems in the Defense Forces as of the end of 2024.

"First of all, it is chaos in management. Then the quality of training and education of people is a large area for increasing our internal efficiency. Ammunition of the entire nomenclature, lack of property and equipment - machines, communications, Starlinks, Mavics - everything that we provide the Defense Forces with," Chmut replied.

Another problem, according to the head of the Come Back Alive foundation, is "the unjustified growth of structures and staffs."

"Let me explain what I mean. Companies of strike drones appeared, started working and gave results - "let's create RUBAKA companies in all brigades". They did. "Let's create battalions". We created battalions - we are already creating regiments. We created regiments - somewhere a brigade is already appearing. Are all these military units staffed with people, equipment, ammunition, consumables, or have we revealed their potential 100%? Obviously not. But there are staff, somewhere they are filled, somewhere people in certain positions are doing something. The state allocates resources for all this," Chmut added.

He emphasized that all this gives rise to the fact that we have a huge number of different units in our staff, but the level of their combat readiness raises a big question.

"Unfortunately, we continue to breed these staff instead of moving from quantity to quality in the troops, instead of stopping duplicating each other, but clearly defining the area of ​​responsibility of each, giving a sufficient amount of resources and demanding results," Taras Chmut said.

The head of Come Back Alive also said that lies are still widespread in the army, because officials are afraid to upset their leader and say what he wants to hear, and not what is really there.

"Because that leader, instead of perceiving the truth, wants to hear the positive. And whoever brings the negative, is fired, regardless of whether it is objective or not. Therefore, this creates a vicious circle of distortion of information and, as a result, the loss of territory, people, equipment, and other property. This is partly why we have such a situation on the battlefield now. Because at all levels up, it is customary to report that everything is fine, everything is holding, the positions are ours. But in reality, this is not so. Because there are very few people in the army who can boldly tell the commander-in-chief or other officials the truth," Chmut summarized.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, in April, Chmut stated that mobilization into the army should be from the age of 20.