Ukraine's new army chief says his immediate goals are better troop rotation and high-tech weapons

Ukraine's new military chief said Friday his immediate goals are to improve the rotation of troops out of the front lines and harness the power of new technology in the fight against Russia's invasion.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, who previously was the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, spoke a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put him in charge of the battlefield campaign against Russia’s invasion.

“New tasks are on the agenda,” Syrskyi said on his Telegram channel.

Though he provided little detail, his remarks appeared to align with Zelenskyy’s stated aim of bringing “renewal” to the armed forces in Thursday’s shake-up and adopting a fresh approach to the fight.

But the changes at the top won’t solve some of Ukraine’s biggest problems: a shortage of manpower that has helped sap morale and may require a mass mobilization, and the inadequate supply of Western weapons to take on Russia’s might.

The shake-up of the military top brass caused some apprehension on the streets of Kyiv, the country's capital.

Alisa Riazantseva, 35, said she had been “generally satisfied” with Syrskyi’s popular predecessor, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi. “We hope that our government has not made a big mistake" by replacing him, she told The Associated Press.

Oleksandr Azimov, 61, said there was “some discontent, some dissatisfaction” about the changes at the top.

That may be a reference to previous criticism of Syrskyi’s strategy of holding on for nine months to the city of Bakhmut, which brought the war’s longest and bloodiest battle and which cost Ukraine dearly in troop losses. But it served the purpose of sapping Russia’s forces.

Syrskyi takes charge at an overall difficult time for Ukraine’s war effort. With the fighting about to enter