There have since been conflicting reports in Western media outlets that Zelensky may have promised to fire Zaluzhny but couldn’t find a suitable replacement or his potential replacements refused to take the post. Some reports say that Zelensky still plans to fire Zaluzhny, while others imply Western leaders ordered him not to.
Mark Sleboda, an international relations and security analyst told Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Thursday that the kerfuffle shows that “if [US President] Joe Biden is the ‘emperor with no clothes’, then that kind of makes Zelensky the ‘butt-naked king.’
“The president has failed to fire his own commander-in-chief. That means there is no center of power within the regime at the moment, or perhaps Zaluzhny has more power than Zelensky. Or, the West is just running the show and Zelensky [has] been revealed as nothing but a puppet middle manager with no agency or control in his own country.”
Sleboda suggested that “either [Zelensky has] to correct the situation and get rid of Zaluzhny, or the center of power in the country [will continue] spiraling out of control.”
The actions taken by people ostensibly serving under Zelensky showcased the tenuousness of his power. “That the entire military apparatus, the generals, even those viewed as close to Zelensky, have shown defiance. I mean, you can't really count this as anything but defiance, a refusal to follow the wishes of the president, certainly in the way that most countries regard the relationship between the executive and the military branches of the country,” Sleboda explained.
“So Zelensky faced a challenge to his presidential authority, one from the West, which is dictating what happens from above, and two, from his own military establishment united against him. … they all said ‘no’ to him,” Sleboda described.
The situation reminded Sleboda of Zelensky’s argument with a soldier in the Azov battalion* in 2019, implying that Zelensky has always had a shaky grasp on his own military.
“Right after he became president. 'I'm not some loser off the street,' he said. And [the] Azov commander is like, 'Yeah, okay, whatever, dude.' And it was after that that he gave up on any attempts to complete the Minsk protocols, which initially he made some gestures, some small gestures towards [that]. That's what he was there to do to get Azov to stop firing artillery shells into Donetsk and they refused.”
Sleboda also discussed the situation on the ground in Ukraine and the growing prospect of war between Iran and the US.
*The Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.