Rob Lee on Syrskyi's Counterattack Order and Lost Ground

Under Oleksandr Syrskyi, counterattacking became the default response to any lost position, and Rob Lee says that taught Ukrainian commanders not to report lost ground at all. Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, described the problem in July 2026; by September he reported that Mykhailo Drapatyi had made the counterattack a commander's choice rather than an order.

The two accounts, about seven weeks apart, show a command failure and its first repair. The first was recorded in Kyiv on 17 July, with Ryan O'Leary and Dmytro Putiata, shortly before Syrskyi was replaced. The second came after Lee and Francis Farrell spent a week at the front in early September.

How did a counterattack order make commanders hide lost ground?

Lee's mechanism is simple. There are moments when a counterattack is right: Russians take a village and are briefly very vulnerable, and pushing them back at once can recover it. But over the previous couple of years, he says, counterattacking became the default option. A commander who acknowledged losing a position was immediately told to retake it.

The position had usually been lost because there was not enough infantry to hold it, so there was certainly not enough to take it back. That left three choices: refuse the order and be fired, accept it and fail, or not acknowledge the lost position. Lee says the result was lying. A bias towards counterattacking, applied when the conditions were not there, corrupted the reporting every other decision depends on.

Hear Rob Lee on the default counterattack at 52:12.

What were Syrskyi's assault regiments?

They were the other half of the same approach. According to Lee, they were mostly volunteer units that became assault battalions in 2024, and some led the Kursk operation, including the 225th, Skala and the 33rd. He calls them a real point of focus for Syrskyi, "his own force that he created himself."

The resourcing showed it. These regiments, Lee says, received more newly mobilised soldiers per month than some army corps, and were a huge priority for vehicles such as Bradleys and Abrams. The logic was coherent: most brigades are undermanned and cannot assault, so concentrate resources in units that can, or that can plug gaps. The assault regiment corps had been reorganised the week before Lee spoke, after heavy criticism.

Why is Code 9.2 the counterexample to Skala?

Each regiment, Lee says, depends on its commander and the standard he sets. Mykhailo Fedorov had singled out two.

Skala does not have a great reputation in many parts of the Ukrainian military, Lee says, while stressing that it depends on who you ask. Its reputation is for assaulting too often, with many assaults failing and conditions not set. There had been investigations into how many mobilised soldiers died non-combat deaths in training, and allegations of beatings and abuse. On the other side, Skala holds the line where it goes, plugs gaps and has had offensive successes, and units built to breach and take losses will not be gentle places.

Code 9.2, the First Assault Regiment, is the unit Fedorov meant when he talked about the general assault concept. In the Kupiansk operation the previous year it used fewer than 100 infantry, leaned heavily on drones to create localised drone superiority, and achieved what Lee calls a very favourable attrition ratio for an offensive.

Was Syrskyi right that Ukraine should attack?

Ryan O'Leary, an American volunteer serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, sides with Syrskyi on this one point, while making clear he disagrees with him on much else. Once an assault gets inside the enemy's drone line and starts clearing drone positions, O'Leary argues, the defenders cannot easily strike back, because ground stations are typically directional. He sees a short window: by February or March 2027, he expects, what works now will not. His preferred shaping is area denial: a thousand mines in every tree line 15 to 20 kilometres deep, because drone teams depend on resupply and nobody walks through open fields.

Lee frames the choice as strategy. Fedorov's idea, as Lee explains it with the caveat that he may be explaining it imperfectly, was to raise costs until the war became unsustainable for Russia: losses faster than Russia can replace them, middle strike against logistics, Crimea made a liability, refineries hit. An offensive might take back territory, Lee says, but carries risks: whether there is enough manpower, and what a failed offensive does to mobilisation.

What did Drapatyi change?

By early September the default had gone. Lee reports that it is "now delegated": commanders counterattack if it makes sense, not automatically. Before, he says, corps commanders were not allowed to pull back from any position, whatever the reason, so every tree line had to be held and there was very little room for initiative.

Farrell describes how it looked from the brigades. Orders came top down, often micromanaged from the general staff: "don't you dare step back from that position," and if you lose it, retake it at whatever cost, even by moving artillery crews or drivers into the infantry. Under Drapatyi, brigade commanders could feel the culture changing. Lee adds that routine weekly inspections of frontline brigades were stopped.

Hear Rob Lee on the end of the default counterattack at 17:18.

Lee calls it an immediate good step, and the start of something Ukraine's army has rarely managed in defence: mission command. The rest of Drapatyi's list is in what Drapatyi must fix.