KYIV, July 22 -- The man who had run Ukraine's armed forces for seventeen months with a grip tight enough to unsettle his own colonels was dismissed on Tuesday, replaced by a general whose reputation rests on doing the opposite: pushing authority down to the soldiers closest to the fight.

President Volodymyr Zelensky announced July 21 that he was removing Oleksandr Syrskyi as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and appointing 44-year-old General Mykhailo Drapatyi in his place. The decision came after weeks of street demonstrations in Kyiv, Lviv, and Dnipro that demanded a change in military leadership, and followed Zelensky's removal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov the previous week, a firing that had itself ignited th...