Vsevolod Kozhemyako was skiing in the Alps on February 24, 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. The next day he was on his way to Kharkiv, his adopted city. “The Russians were close to besieging it and I wanted to be there because of the fear of never returning.” Kozhemyako (Poltava, Ukraine, 1972) is one of the richest men in Ukraine thanks to his agricultural consortium Agrotrade. His return was surprising because other fortunes did just the opposite, fleeing the country. He chose to take a rifle. He created Jartia, a paramilitary battalion of volunteers from his city. Today it is the 13th Brigade of the National Guard, with more than 5,000 soldiers and which has fought some of the most decisive battles of the war.
It is not something new: since the war in Donbas, in 2014, multiple citizen militias had emerged to defend the country and replace a weak and disbanded army. But Kozhemyako’s brigade has gone further, equaled only by mythical regiments of radical Ukrainian nationalism such as Azov, its sister, the 3rd Assault Brigade or the Kraken special forces unit. Jartia has developed, especially with private money, a model force following NATO parameters and organized as if it were the income statement of a company.
Morning Express’ interview with Kozhemyako took place on November 19 in Kharkiv and suffered several interruptions due to calls he had to answer. He was the commander of Jartia when they were a volunteer battalion and retired from combat operations when the regiment was officially incorporated into the National Guard of the Ministry of the Interior, in summer 2023. He is now an advisor to the commander of the National Guard, the General Oleksandr Pivnenko, and responsible for seeking financing for Khartia.
The calls that day focused on the need to quickly deliver resources to units that had managed to take enemy positions. “When you advance and must secure the terrain, expenses on drones, on electronic warfare equipment, are multiplied by three,” explains this businessman, the 88th fortune in Ukraine, according to the magazine Forbes. Military theory precisely indicates that an attacking army needs a three-to-one superiority over the defending one.
“Say in the interview that everything I do is legal,” Kozhemyako asks with his tough guy smile: “International banks [que trabajan con Agrotrade] They ask me if what I do is legal, and I explain that yes, there is an emergency law in Ukraine that allows civilians to fight. These banks are worried about whether I am not doing something that is understood as terrorism, or if I sell weapons, where I get them from, under what law do I join the army, under what law can I kill someone… Nobody likes this in Europe.” .
For a citizen of the European Union it is somewhat strange that a group of civilians can form a paramilitary command that ends up being a regular regiment; It sounds like something from centuries before the formation of contemporary professional armies. Kozhemyako smiles again and responds: “If someone invaded Spain and they had the enemy in their territory, the people would get involved in the defense of their home. If the enemy comes to your house, surrounds your city, maybe the attitude changes.”
He and his followers had to step up because the State works slower than private initiative. This is one of Jartia’s mantras. There are operations, as its founder explains, that cannot wait until the state machinery supports you. Working on the front line allows us to better distinguish how to develop technology to combat more efficiently, including in terms of costs. Colonel Maxim Golubok, one of Khartia’s commanders, details that the work to improve efficiency is also analyzed based on a table of expenses: on average they have quantified that liquidating a Russian soldier costs about 4,000 dollars (3,800 euros). The objective is to reduce this figure.
Kozhemyako confirms that the most precious asset is a soldier’s life, and gives an example of how to preserve it: the brigade successfully carried out a “test assault” against an enemy position using only robots in November. Immediate observation drones, ground drones with machine guns, aerial bomb drones and reconnaissance drones that monitored Russian logistics supply 20 kilometers away. “The support of private money is above all directly aimed at drones, because the State gives many drones, but they must be modified, adjusted to the area in which they operate,” says Kozhemyako, “this area requires permanent innovation and development that only “The private sector allows us.”
post-soviet army
Valeri Zaluzhni, former commander in chief of the army and Ukrainian national idol, now ambassador in London, highlighted on November 20 at a conference organized by the newspaper Pravda that the future of war will be determined by the ability on the front to impose itself using drones. “When robots began to appear en masse on the battlefield, they made movement of soldiers impossible. We cannot move against the Russians, and they cannot do it either,” Zaluzhni summarized. “My theory is that when we complete this technological evolution and have accumulated enough technological material, the opportunity to advance will open.”
This logic is what Jartia follows. “90% of the people who operate with drones, in radio-electronic warfare or in software, are civilians. This says it all,” Kozhemyako points out: “The business environment is more developed than the army. The army is still somewhat post-Soviet, stagnant. People who have been in the business world are more professional in many areas: in human resources, in finance, in communications, in logistics… An entrepreneur learns faster than one who has spent 20 years in the army.”

Kozhemyako is a descendant of homo sovieticus, famous concept thanks to the Nobel Prize in Literature Svetlana Aleksievich, a way of thinking and being that the new Ukraine wants to bury forever. His mother was a music teacher; his father, an engineer. They are both Russian, he says. They arrived in Ukraine with their parents, both soldiers. This experience, and also having collaborated with military units since the Donbas war, lead him to conclude that Ukraine’s “main problem” is that its armed forces have not distanced themselves sufficiently from the Soviet models.
NATO model
The Ukrainian Armed Forces are rapidly adapting to the standards of NATO, the military alliance to which the country aspires to join. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian recruits have been trained in countries of the Atlantic Alliance. Officers from several regiments have explained to Morning Express in the last two years that some knowledge learned does not fit the reality of the war in Ukraine, and that the experience of a decade of combat, from Donbas, is equally important to improve the army.
Kozhemyako is outraged upon hearing this: “It’s nonsense. Can we teach NATO to fight? I am a businessman and when I study the structure of a NATO army I see that it is more logical and more effective. Our main problem is that there are people who believe that adapting to NATO is just changing symbols and colors on a map.”
“You have to think like NATO, not just pretend to be,” Kozhemyako repeats. He concedes that there are issues, such as logistics systems or the use of air power, that are different in Ukraine, but explains that the most important thing about an Atlantic Alliance army is the organizational structure and the autonomy in combat that the lower ranks have: “The main issue in NATO is not weapons, it is algorithms for making decisions at lower levels. Commanders of intermediate and lower ranks can decide between left or right. This is only possible with well-trained managers who know, according to calculations, what decisions they can make. It’s not jazz, but they have several options. In the Soviet army you only have to go straight, neither left nor right, the result does not matter. “Only the order matters.”
Create a brand
Kozhemyako is also responsible for recruitment in Khartia, one of the most complex issues in the Armed Forces and National Guard of Ukraine. The function of their marketing team is to design advertising campaigns about the incentives they offer so that there are civilians who sign a contract with Khartia and not with other regiments. “We have created a brand and we try to produce brand loyalty. We show the positive of it,” says this businessman and volunteer ex-combatant. “We explained that sooner or later people will have to go to the army and that it is better to go to Khartia.”

The problem is that currently there are very few men who want to join the ranks. And not only that: this 2024 there have been tens of thousands of desertions in the army, especially of exhausted people who have been fighting since the beginning of the war. The lack of troops is, along with the shortage of weapons, the great challenge for Ukrainian defense, as the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, highlighted this November.
Kozhemyako admits that the lack of men and desertions also affect his brigade, but prefers not to go into details. “People are not born to fight. “Some like it, but the majority were not born for it,” reflects the godfather of the Khartian brigade. “You have to train people, motivate them. Some people are better in one area or another. People are afraid. We have people who refuse to do what we ask, but we don’t blame them; “We are not made to fight, but to live.”