Oleh Mikats

A general with no Soviet past

When Oleh Mikats was made a major general in August 2015, he became the first Ukrainian general who had never served in the Soviet army. He received the rank on Independence Day.

Mikats comes from Novohrad-Volynskyi, in the Zhytomyr region. As a teenager he attended a School of Young Paratroopers that Afghan war veterans set up in his hometown. He joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 1992: he spent two years at the Odesa Combined Arms School and graduated from the Kharkiv Higher Tank Command School in 1996. At 29 he served with the Ukrainian peacekeeping contingent in Iraq: the Ukrainians were part of a Polish division and operated in Wasit province near the city of Al-Kut, on the border with Iran. In the summer of 2013 he was given command of the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade.

“I led the defense”

When war broke out in the east in 2014, Mikats’s brigade fought pro-russian armed groups and russian troops. On 13 June, near Dobropillia, the brigade came under fire from Grad rocket launchers for the first time. Its soldiers captured one of the vehicles, a BM-21-M1, which the enemy abandoned as it retreated. “Ukraine didn’t even have a vehicle like that in service,” Mikats said. On 24 July its units took Pisky and Pervomaiske, giving Ukrainian forces control of the road between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk.

From September 2014, Mikats led the defense of Donetsk airport. His brigade’s positions stretched for more than 30 kilometers. “I wasn’t defending the airport - I was leading its defense,” he later explained. The militant commander “Givi” got hold of his phone number and kept threatening him, demanding that the Ukrainians leave the airport. Mikats organized the defense of the airport, whose defenders became known as the “cyborgs,” almost to the very end.

After the airport

Next came the 169th “Desna” Training Center, where he had served as a deputy before the war: Mikats took it over in March 2015. He was awarded the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, 3rd class. In 2017 he became deputy commander of Operational Command “West,” and in August 2021 he was appointed commander of Operational Command “East.”

Debates and assessments

In the autumn of 2014, while still commanding his brigade, Mikats ran for parliament as a non-party candidate, third on the Right Sector party list. He said it was Dmytro Yarosh who suggested he run. The party failed to clear the 5% threshold, so Mikats did not become a deputy; he later said he did not regret the decision.

During the ceasefire under the first Minsk agreements, rotations to the airport terminals passed through militant checkpoints, and not every soldier understood why. Mikats explained that this was agreed through the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC), which included Ukrainian and russian officers: weekly rotations let troops be relieved without risk to their lives, while ammunition was brought in by other routes. A handshake between a deputy battalion commander of the 93rd Brigade, call sign “Kupol” (Oleksii Otserklevych), and the militant commander “Motorola” drew heavy criticism on social media at the time. According to Mikats, it was during that very meeting that a truck loaded with ammunition got through to the control tower.

Why it matters today

Oleh Mikats is a commander raised from his first day of service by the army of independent Ukraine, not the Soviet one. From September 2014 he led the defense of Donetsk airport, and he is convinced that it mattered for the whole war: “The airport tied down the enemy’s forces.” His path shows that Ukraine can raise its own commanders, ready to take responsibility at the hardest moment.