Stepan Poltorak
He perfectly plays the role of “the king’s servant, the father of the soldiers,” so flawless and ideal, like a military unit painted for the arrival of the commander-in-chief. Many even believe that for the first time in its history, Ukraine received a real defense minister, capable of taking care of the equipment of the army and victoriously leading it into battle. Alas, this is a very dangerous misconception: the chronology of the ATO eloquently shows that under the command of Stepan Poltorak it is risky not only to launch attacks, but even to sit in the trenches (which are gradually turning into “cauldrons”). The defense of the state was entrusted to a man whose entire dignity lies only in his absolute loyalty to the president.
Brief battle path
Stepan Timofeevich Poltorak was born on February 11, 1965 in the village of Veselaya Dolina, Tarutinsky district, Odessa region, and the birth of the future Minister of Defense was not accompanied by any signs. However, his native village is already quite interesting in itself: it was founded in 1804 by immigrants from Germany, therefore until the 40s of the 20th century (before the deportation of the Germans) it remained predominantly German and Protestant, and was the birthplace of several Lutheran churches known throughout Europe. pastors. The Ukrainians and Russians who later settled there did not have much love for farming, but they willingly went to public service, especially military service. More than fifty people from Veselaya Dolina became officers in the law enforcement agencies of the USSR, Ukraine and the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism) – impressive for a village in which just over a thousand people live!
Following the example of his fellow villagers, Stepan Poltorak, who graduated from Veselodolinsk secondary school in 1982, decided to become a military man. However, he clearly delayed his choice: only in August 1983 did he enter the Ordzhonikidze (Vladikavkaz) Higher Command School of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs (today it is the North Caucasus Military Institute of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism)). This is also a very interesting educational institution: founded in 1938, it trained commanders for the Internal Troops (VV) of the NKVD, the same ones that today are portrayed as the main support of the “Stalinist regime.” Since 1946, the NKVD was renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the essence of the Internal Troops remained the same: unlike convoy and security units, their soldiers do not go back and forth behind a barbed wire fence, but participate in crowd control and combat operations within the country.
Poltorak advanced already in his first year at school: he became a squad commander and a Komsomol organizer of the course, then received the “badges” of a sergeant and rose to the rank of deputy platoon commander. After graduating from college, the young lieutenant went to serve in “hot spots” – that’s what his fellow villagers later told about him. There were plenty of these “hot spots” in the collapsing USSR at that time: Sumgait and Nagorno-Karabakh (1988), Tbilisi, Abkhazia and South Ossetia (1989), Baku, Nakhichevan, Gagauzia and Transnistria (1990). By the way, on Stepan Poltorak’s jacket you can see the bar of the Soviet medal “For Military Merit”. But where exactly did the Soviet “veshnik” earn it in the last years of the existence of the Union? Poltorak maintains a deathly silence about his past, and his official biography is the shortest among the ministers of the current government. Perhaps this is an old tradition of military personnel not to brag about the details of their exploits (for obvious reasons), or maybe he has personal reasons for not talking about the past.
Somewhere during this “peacekeeping activity,” Lieutenant Poltorak met his future wife Inna Gennadievna Ryazanova, and already in 1989 they had a son, Igor, who has now already given the Minister of Defense a grandson.
Stepan Poltorak with his son Igor and cat Semyon Semenych
In the early 90s, Stepan Poltorak transferred to serve in Ukraine. No official information about this has been preserved, but it is known that the USSR military units stationed on the territory of Ukraine did not participate in local conflicts during the collapse of the Union, and Poltorak could only visit “hot spots” as part of military units that later transferred to the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism). The transfer to his homeland became the impetus for Poltorak’s career: very quickly he rose to the rank of commander of a battalion, regiment, and in 1996 of a brigade, receiving the rank of colonel. All this happened against the backdrop of the continuous solitaire of formation, reorganization and disbandment of units of the Internal Troops and the National Guard of Ukraine in 1992-2000. which, along with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the SBU, were considered as the main power base of power. And judging by the fact that all these years the authorities have paid much more attention and funding to them than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it was not external enemies that they were afraid of.
Honorary citizen of Kharkov on the Kiev Maidan
After graduating from the Academy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, from 1997 to 2002, Stepan Poltorak worked as the head of the Department of Combat and Special Training of the Internal Troops: Alexander Kuzmuk recommended him for this position, in 1995-96. commander of the National Guard, and then became the Minister of Defense of Ukraine (1996-2001). For Leonid Kuchma, he was the ideal head of the Ministry of Defense, since Kuzmuk never hatched any conspiracies, and was not capable of it, and whiled away his time by inspecting soldiers’ barracks and canteens. The same qualities of the ideal “servant to the king, father to the soldiers” will appear in Stepan Poltorak.
Largely thanks to this, in 2002, Poltorak was appointed to the position of head of the Kharkov Academy of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, where he worked for 12 years. In 2003 he became a major general, and in 2007 a lieutenant general of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Kuchma was replaced by Yushchenko, who was replaced by Yanukovych, and Poltorak sat in his place and showed loyalty to each new president, as well as to each new Kharkov mayor. For which he was rewarded in 2013 with the title “Honorary Citizen of Kharkov”, awarded to him by Gennady Kernes. By the way, he also got his wife Inna a job at the Academy, helping her obtain the rank of captain of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Stepan Poltorak received his first public criticism from the people he pledged to protect in December 2013, when he and his cadets arrived in Kyiv to take part in the Euromaidan cordon. For future officers of the Internal Troops, this was also practical experience in participating in “containing unrest,” so Poltorak took this “business trip” quite seriously. Participants in the event later noted that in the Poltorak area (near European Square), the cordon did not allow anyone to approach the protesters, not even the ambulance doctors who were needed by the wounded after another attempt to disperse Euromaidan on the night of December 12.
However, no less resonant events with the participation of cadets of the Academy of Internal Troops then took place in Kharkov. After the cadets began to be transported in “shifts” to Kyiv (which Poltorak personally led), activists of the Kharkov Euromaidan first staged a protest picket outside the Academy, and then an open-ended rally with an attempt to block the departing buses of the next “shift.” On February 19, 2014, the confrontation ended in a clash between protestors and “titushki”, police and Academy cadets. Several people were seriously injured, and journalists’ cameras were broken. Later, in December 2014, criminal proceedings were opened regarding this incident, but all charges from the Prosecutor General’s Office were brought against one of the officers of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kharkov. They simply kept silent about the role of Stepan Poltorak and his deputies in those events.
And just a week after the massacre near the walls of the Academy of Internal Troops, its chief Stepan Poltorak, on February 28, 2014, by decree No. 171/2014 acting. President and Speaker of Ukraine Alexander Turchynov (Read more about him in the article by Alexander Turchinov. Skeletons in the closet of the “bloody pastor” of Ukraine) was appointed commander of the Internal Troops of Ukraine. So Poltorak stepped over the smoking barricades of Euromaidan and entered the new government over the heads of those who a few days ago were “participants in the riots” for him. Such an unexpected personnel decision caused indignation among some Euromaidan activists, but it was not heard. And the decision of the Verkhovna Rada of March 13, 2014 could generally be regarded as absurd: Internal troops and “hundreds of Maidan” (retrained as volunteer battalions) merged into one National Guard, recreated by deputies in a fit of revolutionary patriotism, and subordinating it to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov (Read more about him in the article Arsen Avakov: the criminal past of the Minister of Internal Affairs) However, Turchinov’s attempt to appoint Poltorak to the post of head of the National Guard initially ended in failure: at the vote on April 1, 2014, Rada deputies did not support the candidacy of the former “Maidan Strangler.”
But Poltorak, who quickly navigated the political situation, was not slow to prove his loyalty to the new government and took an active part in preparing the operation to liberate the building of the Kharkov Regional State Administration from the separatists who occupied it – on April 7, 2014, they proclaimed the “Kharkov Republic.” The very next day, the Jaguar explosives unit, selected by Poltorak, and a detachment of volunteers from members of the Kharkov “Patriot of Ukraine”, with which Avakov had long-standing ties (the Azov battalion would be formed from them), liquidated the Kharkov hotbed of separatism. And on April 15, after several days of behind-the-scenes consultations, deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, by resolution No. 4485, approved Stepan Poltorak as commander of the National Guard of Ukraine.
In fact, the political and personnel leadership of the National Guard remained in the hands of Avakov, and military command, training and support were placed on the shoulders of Poltorak – who, thus, also became the “father” of the first volunteer battalions subordinate to NG.
War without victory
Poltorak and Avakov failed to repeat their Kharkov success in the Donbass: the ATO was firmly stalled already in Slavyansk, where a relatively small detachment of Igor Girkin’s militants managed to not only stop, but also partially disarm the vanguard of the Ukrainian security forces, imposing on them a three-month positional war. However, subsequently, no official investigation was carried out into this failure, which led to the failure to meet deadlines and drag the ATO into an endless war, which allowed the enemy to gradually increase its forces and stretch the front in an arc from Lugansk to Mariupol. Everything was attributed to confusion, to the “predecessors” who destroyed the army, to the treachery of the separatists and Putin (*criminal), as well as to the insufficient fighting spirit of the Ukrainian security forces.
This was not the only and far from the last “mistake” of the commander of the National Guard. Suddenly it turned out that the talent of a combat commander and the many years of experience of the leader Stepan Poltorak had disappeared somewhere. It was simply surprising that a man who had headed the training of elite and command personnel of the Internal Military for 17 years could make such miscalculations and mistakes – just like his former students. Thus, on May 22, 2014, in the area of the Rubezhnoye railway station, units of the National Guard entered into battle with a small group of poorly armed militants – and retreated, without any clear orders from above, which allowed the separatists to gain a foothold in the Rubezhnoye-Lisichansk-Severodonetsk region for two months. The subsequent operation to liberate these cities led to numerous casualties and destruction, with the death of Colonel Alexander Radievsky, who commanded the 21st Brigade of the National Guard.
And on the night of May 29, 2014 in Lugansk (which the separatists took control of at the end of April), after a long siege, militants captured military unit No. 3035 of the Internal Troops Regiment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Not only small arms and ammunition fell into their hands, but also armored vehicles – which were later used by the separatists in battles against Ukrainian security forces in the Shchastya area of the Lugansk airport. Why did the combat-ready military unit remain inactive all this time or did not break through to the west, but ultimately allowed the enemy to capture serviceable armored vehicles? Nobody asked these questions to either the commander of the National Guard or the Minister of Internal Affairs.
The next failures of military leader Stepan Poltorak were not long in coming. During the tragic events of Izvarin (July) and Ilovaisk (August 2014), due to poorly developed command plans and the lack of clear discipline, individual units of the National Guard fell into the “cauldrons”. They were in such a hurry to clear the liberated territory that they literally walked to the back of the head, and even then next to units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, as a result of which they fell into fire ambushes. And again, Stepan Timofeevich was amazingly lucky: not only was he not asked for anything (until now), but he was also showered with starfall. On August 23, 2014, for the magnificent celebrations of Independence Day held in Kyiv, he was promoted to Colonel General. And when in the capital, realizing the scale of the military catastrophe, they grabbed their heads and hastened to dismiss Valery Geletey (Read more about him in the article by Valery Geletey. I’m not happy to serve, but I need to be served) then Poroshenko decided to make Stepan Poltorak the next defense minister.
Pro-presidential analysts sang his praises, talking about Poltorak’s extensive combat experience and his wisdom as a strategist and teacher. And as the main argument in favor of his image as a “father to soldiers,” they cited the example of the equipment of the Internal Troops, which was much better than that of those suffering dire need for the entire Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, they simply forgot (or turned a blind eye) to the fact that Poltorak had nothing to do with this. Firstly, he commanded the Internal Troops and the National Guard only since March 2014, and secondly, the Internal Troops of Ukraine have been funded and equipped better than the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the time of Kuchma. Poroshenko’s choice was explained simply: with the aggravation of relations between the emerging presidential team and the “People’s Front”, Petro Alekseevich decided to entrust an important power post to a potentially loyal person not associated with any political or oligarchic groupings. Poltorak became under Poroshenko what Kuzmuk was under Kuchma.
However, the legend of the caring General Poltorak, who is concerned that his soldiers are always well-fed, dressed and well-armed, has taken root in Ukrainian society and is still alive. The hardest thing was to convince the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of it, although Poroshenko himself represented his candidacy and campaigned for it: only 245 deputies cast their votes for his appointment on October 14, 2014. As a bonus gift, on the same day the president, by decree, promoted Stepan Poltorak to army general.
A protracted positional war is how one could characterize Poltorak’s strategy as commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, this could be explained by the constraint of his actions by the conditions of the Minsk Peace. However, even in defense, Stepan Poltorak again managed to catastrophically collapse. First, after protracted battles, in January 2015, the Ukrainian Armed Forces abandoned the Donetsk airport – a symbol of the tenacity of Ukrainian soldiers.
The battle for Debaltsevo (February 2015) could have become the Ukrainian Kursk Bulge, but it became almost a new Ilovaisk. Even a schoolchild understood that the enemy would try to close this ring several months before the battle, barely looking at the ATO map. But no one prepared for a serious defense, did not increase reserves, or use long-range artillery. This latest miscalculation of the “combat general” led to the loss of a strategic settlement, hundreds of killed, wounded and captured Ukrainian soldiers, and most importantly, to the loss of the authority of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which now began to lose to the separatists even in defense.
Without forgetting about yourself
Since the appointment of Stepan Poltorak as Minister of Defense, his well-being has risen sharply. If in 2013 he declared 140,637 hryvnia of his income and 46,032 hryvnia of the income of family members, then in 2015 his income increased to 357 thousand hryvnia, and his wife’s to 499 thousand hryvnia! I wonder how a captain manages to earn more than an army general?
Well, although Stepan Poltorak is not a multimillionaire, like his capital-hungry predecessor, and is not even seen in any open business, he does not forget about himself and his family, having become the subject of several small scandalous revelations. The first concerned his housing and means of transportation. At first, the new Minister of Defense modestly stated that he lives with his family (five people) in an ordinary three-ruble ruble, does not have his own car and drives a company car. However, meticulous journalists found out that Stepan Poltorak now lives in an elite housing complex located on the territory of a special military unit. “I moved there for safety reasons!” – said Poltorak. Moreover, this strange military unit is so classified that the Ministry of Defense refused to give at least some information about it. It’s interesting, what kind of state secret could the Ministry of Defense’s government expenditures on mansions for its leadership represent?
However, the Minister of Defense could not explain why the Lexus car in which he regularly drives out of the gates of this residential special complex is registered to a certain Vera Mochailo – who turned out to be the mother of the wife of his assistant Ivan Brik, who was associated with him from work at the Kharkov Academy. But not long ago, One and a half assured that this car belongs to the Ministry of Defense! As if not understanding that repeated lies from the mouth of the Minister of Defense are much worse than wasting the budget on our own needs. Money can be returned, but lost trust in a person who sends thousands of soldiers into battle can never be returned.
Well, the current Minister of Defense simply has no luck with assistants and old friends. Back in January 2015, the head of the logistics department of the National Guard, Svyatoslav Manzhura, another of Poltorak’s comrades at the Academy, who had recently received his position at the personal request of the Minister of Defense, was caught red-handed with a bribe of 232,000 hryvnia from officials of Visit LLC. The bribe was a kickback from a tender transaction conducted by the department. Poltorak “did not notice” the scandal, fortunately it was not directly related to him.
Stepan Timofeevich does not even forget his classmates. So, one of them, Alexander Fedorovich Kuruch, now working as a simple physical education teacher, received a GLOCK-17 combat pistol and 200 rounds of ammunition as a gift from a school friend! On what basis, and under what law, Ukrainian physical education teachers received the right to own a combat short-barreled weapon, Poltorak never explained. And no one was surprised that by another order, Poltorak awarded Arseny Yatsenyuk with a “gangster” Thompson submachine gun, Arsen Avakov with a Colt-1911 pistol, and Alexander Turchinov with the legendary “Mauser-96”. Poltorak did not forget about himself, rewarding himself “for courage and valor” with GLOCK-19.
In November 2015, a group of people’s deputies turned to the Minister of Defense with information about the existence of an entire system of military registration and enlistment offices paying off mobilization, citing examples of prices and “kickbacks to the top.” Poltorak promised to look into it – and, it seems, she shelved this information. He also did not respond to the appeal that during mobilization, in fulfilling the plan, the army “rowed” everyone in a row (who could not pay off), including alcoholics and drug addicts, tuberculosis patients and even cancer patients, men over 55. But Stepan Timofeevich likes, from time to time, to stage a performance of checking the soldiers’ canteen or to arrange for the army to dress up in a brand new uniform. By the way, since he received the post of Minister of Defense, the number of competitions and tenders to update the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has increased significantly – accordingly, the costs of conducting them have also increased. True, the troops at the front have never even seen the new design uniform, and they are glad to at least receive the old-style uniform on time…
Sergey Varis, for SKELET-info
