President Zelensky may want to sack his top commander, Valery Zaluzhny, and blame him for all of Kiev’s battlefield failures, but is being held back from doing so by Kiev’s chief sponsor, and by domestic political considerations, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov has said.
“Regarding the conflict between Zelensky and Zaluzhny, I don’t think it’s just a political game,” Azarov, who served as Ukraine’s PM from 2010 to early 2014 before being swept from power shortly before the February 2014 Maidan coup, pondered in a social media post on Wednesday.
“The fact that Zelensky would have already removed Zaluzhny and blamed him for all the failures if he could have is also clear to me. But he can’t remove him. One reason is that the Americans don’t allow him to do so. Another is that Zaluzhny’s removal would only improve his ratings and popularity,” Azarov wrote.
“Everyone understands that Zelensky is running out of time, and Zaluzhny himself also understands this very well. I have no doubt that he has political ambitions. Moreover, he has quite good prospects, although the question is when elections will take place,” the politician wrote, referring to elections scheduled for next March, which Zelensky has repeatedly threatened to cancel on the pretext that the country is under martial law.
Zaluzhny’s comments for a leading British business publication last month in which he admitted that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had failed and that “NATO textbooks” didn’t help much kicked off a major spat with Zelensky, who insisted that the conflict with Russia was “not a stalemate,” and that Ukraine would be further along in its counteroffensive if only it received more Western military equipment.
Zaluzhny was conspicuously absent from a meeting between Zelensky and top generals in Kharkov region last week after a month filled with cloak and dagger intrigue, ranging from the sacking of pro-Zaluzhny commanders, to the mysterious death of the general’s chief of staff in a freak live grenade explosion at a birthday party, to the heavy metals poisoning of the wife of the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service.
The Zelensky-Zaluzhny spat has turned explicitly political, with the president’s ratings falling to below half that of his top commander, according to internal polling (70 percent favorability compared to 32 percent, respectively). A survey by Ukrainian media last week revealed that Ukrainians “trust” Zaluzhny more than they do Zelensky, and that the commander might win the vote if elections were held today and were fair and open.