A career officer with more than thirty years in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Vladyslav Klochkov rose from lieutenant in a mechanized regiment in Luhansk Oblast to Major General. He graduated from the Odesa Institute of Land Forces as a military engineer, completed operational and senior command training at the National Defence University of Ukraine, and took NATO courses in crisis leadership, military planning and strategic communications.
When the war in Donbas began in 2014 he went to the front: chief of staff of the 92nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, then, from April 2015, commander of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade — one of Ukraine's most storied combat units. In 2019 he became First Deputy Commander of Operational Command East, and in 2021 he led the Ukrainian side of the Rapid Trident exercise with NATO at Yavoriv. He was promoted to Brigadier General in December 2020 and Major General in December 2021.
From October 2021 to August 2024 he headed the army's Main Directorate for Moral & Psychological Support: the man responsible for the fighting spirit of an army at war, through the hardest years of the full-scale invasion. He helped build the modern system of psychological support, with military psychologists working alongside chaplains, and pushed for NATO standards on mental health and combat stress control. He holds a PhD in military psychology — the science of what keeps soldiers standing — and has published more than twenty scientific works.
Ukraine faces a wave of psychological trauma without precedent in modern Europe. Millions of veterans — and the families who wait for them — will carry the war home long after the fighting ends. The systems to help them barely exist.
Klochkov is building them. As Director of the Ukraine Center for Traumatic Stress — a program of the Borderlands Foundation — he leads Ukraine's first systematic platform for recovery from the psychological cost of war: research, clinical therapy, education, and social support in one system, with special attention to the 69,000 women serving in Ukraine's armed forces.
He also founded the Odysseus Project for Ukraine, a coalition of specialists from more than twelve countries working on psychological recovery for servicemen, veterans and communities, and directs the Military Psychology Programme at American University Kyiv. He is President of the Ukrainian Pitch and Putt Association, which puts him at home in the Summit’s golf program.
“The opening of the Center is our duty to those who risked their lives for Ukraine.”
At the London 2025 Summit, Klochkov spoke twice. On the Transforming Trauma into Strength panel he presented the Center and the scale of the projected mental-health crisis — and what it will take to meet it: triage, qualified specialists, research, and international cooperation. And on the military-history panel, he put the whole mission in one sentence:
“Those who don't remember their history don't have a future.”
He is part of the delegation to Dallas and Washington, D.C., November 16–19, 2026 — carrying the case for Ukraine's veterans directly to America. The road to Dallas →
