Commander of 41st Mechanized Brigade Romashko as example of incompetent personnel decisions of some military leaders

Author: Yurii Butusov

I considered the career of Serhii Romashko, the Brigade Commander of the 41st Brigade, who is discussed by those who fought with him in the Chasiv Yar area and in the Toretsk direction.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, General Yurii Sodol and Brigade Commander Serhii Romashko are pictured.

Here's a spoiler: Romashko is neither Syrskyi's compadre nor Barhylevych's compadre, nor does he have any family ties to the leadership of the Armed Forces.

Serhii Romashko is a career military officer who served in the army until 2011 and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel as a Battalion Commander of the 95th Airmobile Brigade. When the war started in 2014, Romashko did not return to the army, did not go through the ATO, and did not gain any real combat experience; he was engaged in business, running an agricultural enterprise in the Zhytomyr region.

It is worthy of respect that Romashko voluntarily went to war in February 2022. He was appointed commander of the 515th Battalion of the 1st Bohun Special Forces Brigade - it was not a comfortable and convenient position - a military unit formed from scratch from volunteer fighters, an ordinary rifle battalion with a large shortage of commanders and sergeants of all levels. Against this backdrop, Romashko, who had no war experience but was a career officer, seemed more organized and capable at the formation stage, and his appointment was logical.

Learning about real war came at a bloody price. Thus, on April 5, 2022, in the Kherson direction, a group of soldiers from the 515th Battalion was tasked with advancing along a railroad track in completely open terrain and suddenly encountered Russians. According to several combatants who managed to survive, 20 of our soldiers were killed and 3 were captured. The enemy posted a video of how they were finishing off our soldiers in the terrain where there were no shelters. Participants in the battle say there was no planning and preparation for the attack, no intelligence.

From a military point of view, it is important to note that the 515th Battalion in the Kherson region did not receive its own area of responsibility, where active combat operations were taking place; the units were assigned to the control of other military units. Therefore, Romashko did not gain any experience in managing combat operations in the area of intense enemy activity.

Soldiers say that as a career officer, Romashko had difficulty finding a common language with volunteer fighters who did not accept the peacetime army hierarchy. This led to many conflicts and misunderstandings. Romashko, on the other hand, is well respected among the battalion's staff officers.

The 515th Battalion was then briefly redeployed to defend the village of Chervona Hora near Bakhmut, but the small number of aerial reconnaissance assets, insufficient numbers, and low combat capability did not allow it to hold off the enemy's advance for long.

It is difficult to explain logically why the Land Forces Command decided to promote Romashko to the position of Deputy Commander of the 44th Mechanized Brigade in 2023 after the episode on Chervona Hora. No worse or better than most others, his experience is limited and ambiguous. Obviously, Romashko's staff academy played a key role; he speaks clear language and behaves exactly as the senior army leadership of the Armed Forces is used to.

The 44th Brigade did not have its own area of responsibility, some units were attached to the Kupiansk tactical group, and Romashko could not prove himself there. He was appointed to the formal position of commandant of the village of Dvorichna. It was from this position that he was appointed commander of the 41st Mechanized Brigade, which had a large area of responsibility and 6 battalions in its ranks.

Romashko was appointed by Oleksandr Syrskyi, and the commander of Kupiansk, General Andrii Hnatov, the current commander of the Khortytsia OSGT, came to present the new brigade directly.

They had been trying to replace O. Makukha, the 41st Brigade Сommander for several months, among the reasons - refusal to accept the line of fortifications, on which a lot of money had been spent, but which was unsuitable for building defense. Therefore, Romashko's appointment does not look like a planned career move, but rather like Hnatov and Syrskyi looked at the officer on the spot who caught their eye as the commandant of Dvorichna, and they decided to appoint a person they liked to an important position of Brigade Commander without analyzing his operational record and combat experience.

I want to emphasize that this is not Romashko's fault. His appointment to a position he is not qualified for is the responsibility of the Armed Forces leadership.

This is despite the fact that we have literally a whole company of removed brigade commanders and battalion commanders in reserve and on training, people with experience and reputation. However, for the Land Forces Command, it was much more important to appoint a person with no experience, but who knows how to report and behave properly, to a brigade of six battalions.

It is worth noting that the 41st Brigade was a newly formed unit with many organizational problems, a shortage of personnel, incomplete equipment, and a low level of combat training. In other words, creating the combat capability of such a brigade required extraordinary leadership skills and competencies from the commander.

Moreover, in the same situation, Syrskyi appointed a competent commander to the similarly newly formed 32nd Brigade, an experienced battalion commander of the 22nd Battalion of the 92nd Brigade, Kovtsur. Why wasn't a commander of the same level appointed to the 41st?

It is difficult to understand why, by the decision of Syrskyi and Sodol, the 41st Brigade was sent to one of the key areas - Chasiv Yar. What was the command thinking when they sent one of their weaker units into such hell? We see big problems with the real assessment of the combat capability of the troops. The heroic soldiers of the 41st Brigade fought fairly, suffered significant losses, and the brigade began to receive a significant number of attached units.

The 41st Brigade at Chasiv Yar could not prove itself primarily because of the weakness of its management. Heroic people quickly exhausted, and there were many of them in the 41st Brigade, and they could not hold the front alone. The key strongpoints were held by the attached units. All the representatives of the units say that Brigade Commander Romashko was not in control of the real situation, and the interaction between the troops was weak.

After the 41st and 67th Mechanized Brigade lost several positions, the soldiers of the 67th, not Romashko, were blamed for all the problems. As a result, several battalion commanders were dismissed from the 67th and about a thousand soldiers were transferred to other units, mostly to the same 41st. As we can see now, it was completely undeserved. The 41st's defense continued to collapse.

The key links in the last days of the defense of the Kanal neighborhood unit in Chasiv Yar were the special unit of the Defense Intelligence Service of Ukraine "Kraken" and the 225th Assault Battalion. Their soldiers are very critical of the 41st Brigade's management.

After the DIU unit was withdrawn from the Kanal area and the 41st Brigade units accepted the line, the Kanal's defense collapsed rapidly.

But this is not the end of the story. Despite the obvious loss of combat capability of the 41st Brigade, the command of the OSGT Khortytsia made a decision approved by Syrskyi to redeploy the 41st Brigade not to the rear for reorganization, but to the defense of Toretsk and New York. From this direction, the 24th Mechanized Brigade, which had been successfully defending there for a year and had not moved a single step back, was to be transferred. It is absolutely unclear what this decision was based on.

Of course, the regrouping was immediately noticed by Russian intelligence. As soon as the first units of the 41st Brigade deployed to the positions of the 24th Brigade near Toretsk and New York, the Russians attacked and captured two company strongholds on the very first day. Then the defense continued to collapse every day, the 41st Brigade could not hold out, and it was immediately reinforced with newly assigned forces. The crisis in the area of Toretsk and New York is a crisis resulting primarily from wrong management decisions.

Now, the attached units near Toretsk are even publicly accusing Romashko - yes, it is his responsibility that he cannot honestly report his inability to fulfill such difficult combat missions with his own forces and blames others. Romashko continues to command the 41st Brigade despite all the scandals and failures. That's why people in the army think that he is someone's compadre and that he is forgiven for everything.

By the way, the order to the 24th Brigade to deploy its units to the positions that the 41st Brigade had long ago lost could not be fulfilled. The defense of Chasiv Yar also goes in the doldrums. And now, instead of admitting their mistake in misjudging the combat capability of the 41st Brigade and in the erroneous rotation of the 24th Brigade, they are trying to shift the responsibility to the 24th Brigade`s Commander I. Holyshevskyi. I hope that during such intense fighting, the 24th Brigade will not be left without an experienced commander who could not perform a miracle, because miracles do not happen in war.

I hope that systemic conclusions will be drawn from the situation in the 41st Brigade, the scandal with the 67th Brigade, and the tragic circumstances of the loss of positions in Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, and New York.

Based on these sad events, the leadership of the Armed Forces should immediately reconsider its approaches to three key issues in personnel work:

1. Appointment of the key management level - brigade commanders. We have only one hundred of them, is it really hard to understand that these one hundred people should be the elite of the army, with high leadership skills, independent thinking, and not convenient loyal "what do you want?" Why are brigade commander-leaders being removed and weak and uninspired ones being appointed? Doesn't O. Syrskyi understand that he must rely on leaders who strengthen him? The army's combat capability begins with trust in its commanders. Only then can there be quality PR.

2. The setting of combat tasks should be based on a realistic assessment of the combat capability of units, not just the number of personnel on the list. Combat capability is determined by people's trust in the brigade commander in the first place, and this is easy to do, at least on the basis of long-established methods of the center for moral and psychological support or other types of surveys. This, by the way, is also used in NATO armies.

3. The leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine should immediately apply an after-action review to objectively evaluate operations and decisions in order to correct their mistakes on their own, rather than running around and reading fair criticism about themselves on social media.

Yurii Butusov, Censor.NET