He fought in the Caucasus campaign of World War I and rose from private to ensign in the Imperial Russian Army. Parkhomenko joined the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, serving with cavalry units, and ended the war as a regimental commander. During the interwar period, he continued to hold regimental command, but was arrested and imprisoned during the Great Purge. Reinstated in the army, Parkhomenko commanded a motorized division in Belarus at the outbreak of Operation Barbarossa. After his division suffered heavy losses in the first weeks of the war, he was sent to the North Caucasus and led a cavalry corps in the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya Offensive of early 1942. During that year, Parkhomenko commanded another cavalry corps and the 9th Army in the early stages of the Battle of the Caucasus, then served as an army deputy commander during the Battle of Stalingrad. He spent most of 1943 in the Soviet Far East as a corps commander and returned to command a corps in northwestern Ukraine in early 1944, but was relieved of command. Parkhomenko never held a command again and spent the rest of the war as an army deputy commander before retiring in the early 1950s.