Comments Ukraine's new commander-in-chief, General Mykhailo Drapatyi, made in a 2023 interview about the population of Donbas have resurfaced this week and are being heavily amplified by Russian state media, days after President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed him to replace Oleksandr Syrskyi amid mass protests in Kyiv.

In the interview, filmed for the Ukrainer W YouTube documentary channel and recirculated this week, Drapatyi disparaged the residents of the Donbas as “criminals” who are only looking for “handouts” and not the lost fellow countrymen that Ukraine is fighting to reunite with the rest of the country.  

Drapatyi said: “Throughout their entire history, Donetsk and Luhansk regions have largely consisted of settlers and criminal elements. That's why the population there is so unconscious… For some reason, people there want more handouts.”

Kremlin-backed outlet RT and several Russian-language Pravda-branded sites have run the remarks prominently since Drapatyi's appointment; IntelliNews has not been able to independently verify the full, unedited context of the original interview.

It matters because it lands at a sensitive moment: Zelensky replaced Syrskyi under pressure from street protests over the war's conduct, and Drapatyi's own record and standing are now under scrutiny from multiple directions at once — Ukrainian soldiers and commentators debating his fitness for the job, and Russian propaganda outlets using old remarks to paint him as prejudiced against Ukrainians from the east. The Kyiv Independent has canvassed Ukrainian soldiers' views on the appointment, while former commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi broke his silence to call the new job “incredibly difficult.”

Drapatyi has not publicly addressed the resurfaced remarks. Given the sensitivity of attributing contested statements to a senior named official in an active propaganda war, and that the only source IntelliNews has for the original interview is second-hand social media circulation rather than the primary footage, this draft should be treated as provisional pending direct sourcing of the Ukrainer W interview itself.