The commander of the 80th Separate Air Assault Brigade of the Galician Airborne Assault Troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Emil Ishkulov was removed from his post for a dispute with the command. He will be replaced by Pavlo Rozlach, a brigadier general of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade.
This is stated in the Babel material.
Babel sources reported that for some time 80 Air Assault Brigade was under restoration. But they were not allowed to fully recover — the brigade was ordered to advance in a certain direction.
Ishkulov was given a task that he called unrealistic: there was a lack of time, energy and people. According to sources, the command did not like this and he was removed from his post. Since Ishkulovʼs subordinates came to his defense, later the Command of the State Security Forces spread the word that Ishkulov was not being fired, but was being transferred to a higher position in the Command of the Air Assault Forces.
Emil Ishkulov.
Later, the Airborne Assault Forces informed that the next commander of the 80th Brigade would be a competent combat officer, a full knight of the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi. According to the Babel source, this is Pavlo Rozlach, a brigade commander of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade.
What is known about Pavlo Rozlach
Pavlo Rozlach is 36 years old. He is a military officer, studied at the Chernihiv Military Lyceum, then at the Odesa Institute of Ground Forces. In 2009, he graduated from the Lviv Institute of Ground Forces of the National University "Lviv Polytechnic" with a major in "Combat application and control of the actions of airmobile units".
After university, he served in the 95th brigade. As part of it, he began fighting in 2014 — first near Slovyansk, then near the village of Pisky, near the Donetsk airport. In 2015, he became the youngest combatant in Ukraine — at that time he was only 27 years old.
Pavlo Rozlach is a brigadier general of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade.
In 2019, he retired to the reserve, became a private entrepreneur and built an aqua farm in the Zhytomyr region, breeding catfish and trout. But in two years he returned to the army and since then served as the commander of one of the battalion-tactical groups (BTG) of the 80th separate brigade of the Air Assault Forces.
At the beginning of 2023, the 82nd Assault Brigade was created on the basis of this BTG, and Rozlach became its commander. The brigade participated in the battles for Robotyne. Rozlach was removed from the post of brigadier general of the 82nd brigade, in fact, for the same thing that Ishkulov did now, and was appointed to a staff position in the Command of the Defense Forces. From there he came to the post of brigade commander of the 80th brigade.
What preceded
On July 29, 2024, the press service of the Air Assault Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported that the commander of the 80th brigade Emil Ishkulov would be appointed to a higher position.
A few hours earlier, the commanders of the airborne assault battalions and companies of the 80th brigade recorded a video message in which they appealed to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, and Commander of the Air Assault Forces Maksym Myrhorodskyi with a call to keep Ishkulov in his post.
The fighters said that they did not understand why such commanders were "unpleasant to the top leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine", and described Ishkulov as an undisputed authority and a professional military man.
The Air Assault Forces Command noted that the information being distributed "is accompanied by an incorrect interpretation and contains a number of inaccuracies." The press service also listed the achievements of Emil Ishkulov and added that he will be able to apply his knowledge, skills and leadership qualities "already on the scale of the Airborne Assault Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine."