Yevhenii Khmara brings to the Defence Ministry experience of special operations, strikes on Russia's oil industry and the "ruthless cost asymmetry" principle.

This emerges from an article published by the American outlet The National Interest.

A defence ministry is not a military command: the minister does not lead units directly on the battlefield but is responsible for the machinery that supplies the army with the resources it needs.

That means procurement, coordination of the defence industry, budgets, personnel decisions and relations between state institutions.

It is in this area that Khmara’s experience may prove particularly significant.

During his time at the Security Service of Ukraine, he was closely associated with the work of the Alpha special operations unit. Although the unit accounts for only a small part of Ukraine’s forces, the SBU has reported an exceptionally high contribution by its operators to the losses inflicted on Russian troops.

By the service’s own calculations, Alpha accounted for up to 20% of all Russian infantry losses.

No less telling was the campaign against Russia’s oil industry. Over the seven months Khmara led the SBU, operations against Russian oil refineries grew considerably in scale and became more systematic.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine estimates that almost 43% of Russia’s refining capacity has now been put out of action.

This has affected Russia’s domestic fuel market too: the country has recorded double-digit falls in refined product output this year, is having to increase fuel imports, and has introduced restrictions on petrol sales in some regions.

One of the key principles Khmara has applied is the concept of “ruthless cost asymmetry”.

Its essence is to conduct strike operations costing around 2% of the economic damage they inflict on the enemy.

This is not simply about destroying individual targets, but about striking the critical nodes of a system — refineries, transport hubs, export routes and other elements of the Russian economy that finance the war.

Khmara has also stressed a fundamental distinction between Ukrainian and Russian strikes.

Russia, he says, attacks facilities in order to terrorise the civilian population, while Ukraine focuses on what supplies the Russian war machine with resources.

This approach involves constantly weighing cost against result: the price of a drone against the value of the facility destroyed, the cost of an operation against the scale of the economic damage done to the enemy.

It is this approach, and this way of thinking, that could matter in his work at the Ministry of Defence.

The ministry is, in effect, engaged in allocating scarce resources — money, weapons, equipment, human potential and risk.

And Khmara’s experience in recent years has consisted largely of finding ways to extract the maximum result from the resources available.

As ArmyInform reported earlier, Yevhenii Khmara, who previously headed the Security Service of Ukraine’s Special Operations Centre and later led the service itself, has become Ukraine’s new Minister of Defence.