Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is on thin ice.
That’s the conclusion of international affairs and security analyst Mark Sleboda, who joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits crew Monday to discuss the ongoing political drama in the country in the wake of the country’s failed counteroffensive this year.
“He fears another Maidan… he fears a coup,” said Sleboda, referring to the 2014 protests that saw far-right mobs drive elected president Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine. The unrest, openly backed by Western powers, was supported by only a minority of the Ukrainian population but succeeded in firmly shifting the politics of the country towards a Russophobic stance.
Sleboda believes the primary challenger to Zelensky’s power is Valerii Zaluzhny, the current commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian military. Political forces inside and outside the country may be coalescing around Zaluzhny as an alternative to Zelensky’s leadership, according to Sleboda.
Aware of the threat, Zelensky “has replaced several of Zaluzhny’s generals in the past weeks – fired them – without any consultations with him,” said Sleboda. The analyst also noted the recent death of Major Gennadiy Chastyakov, a top aide to Zaluzhny, who was killed earlier this month when a grenade given to him as a birthday gift exploded. Sleboda speculates that the strange incident may have been a “political hit by Zelensky’s administration.”
“Most of the Ukrainian social media channels believe it was a political hit, a warning to Zaluzhny,” said Sleboda.
Sleboda discounted a story that has recently re-emerged chiefly blaming former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for Ukraine’s unwillingness to seek peace with Russia in early 2022, calling it a “salvo in the quite opaque political infighting that is now going on in Kiev.”
“I don’t think they [the Ukrainian government] were ever more serious about this than they were about the Minsk accords,” said Sleboda, noting the “ideological nature” of the country’s firmly anti-Russian leadership since 2014.
Zelensky has faced criticism over Ukraine’s counteroffensive earlier this year which failed to significantly challenge Russian forces as the country’s special military operation in Ukraine continues. Sleboda noted recent comments by Zelensky’s officials in US media calling the Ukrainian president “delusional.”
Host Michelle Witte noted the damage to morale in the Ukrainian armed forces caused by the chronic political dysfunction, saying “constant purges of relatively high ranking military officers during war would seem to perhaps have a negative effect on your war effort.”
Sleboda agreed, claiming President Zelensky’s western backers are looking for a way to replace the Ukrainian leader.
“It seems quite obvious to me that the US and in general the West has lost confidence in Zelensky and they’re trying to find a way to replace him with Zaluzhny without another blatantly obvious US-backed coup in the country so soon after the last one,” said Sleboda, referring to widely-reported evidence of US involvement in the 2014 ouster of Yanukovych.
Sleboda noted that last week, for the first time, Zaluzhny was invited to a NATO meeting discussing Ukrainian military policy in Ramstein instead of Zelensky.
Sleboda’s analysis comes amidst recent comments by a senior Ukrainian MP lamenting that the country’s military leadership “has been unable to provide a [strategic] plan for 2024.” The country’s Western backers have reportedly encouraged Ukraine to draft the elderly, teenagers, and women into the army.
Sleboda also commented on the state of politics in the Netherlands, where the party of populist rightwing figure Geert Wilders recently won elections.
“He [Wilders] has also come out publicly as being against aid for Ukraine, which is the big foreign policy kicker against the Western orthodoxy,” said Sleboda.
“And at the moment that may be more important for everyone else’s panic than anything else. Especially considering that the Netherlands has been a disproportionately large supplier of financial and military aid to the Kiev regime, and they are one of the two principal countries that is supposed to supply F-16s to Ukraine next year.”
“That gets interesting from an international perspective,” said Sleboda, speculating that the politician’s support (or lack thereof) for the Western proxy conflict against Russia may ultimately be more important to leaders than his controversial anti-immigrant views.