Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky reshuffled his cabinet on March 26 by firing Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov and replacing him with Oleksandr Litvinenko, who previously held the position of the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.
"I refer to this as shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic," Larry Johnson, a retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official, told Sputnik. "That's an expression we've used in English when your ship is sinking, but you're focused upon minor stuff about where the deck chair should be placed. You should be more concerned about keeping the ship from going under. And replacing Danilov is not going to change the trajectory of this war. Where it's headed, Ukraine is losing."
Danilov has long been known for controversial and chauvinist rhetoric. Earlier this month, the Ukrainian official made obscene remarks insulting China's special representative on Eurasian affairs, Li Hui, during a live interview on national TV. Danilov's comments came as Beijing is rallying global support for peace negotiations of the Ukrainian conflict.
Earlier, Danilov targeted people using the Russian language in Ukraine, claiming that Russian speakers should be "stamped out" and "thrown out" of the country. On another occasion, he said that the Russian language should disappear from the territory of Ukraine as "an element of hostile propaganda," while insisting that the English language is mandatory in the Eastern European state. Danilov's slurs prompted Stephane Dujarric, the representative of the UN secretary-general, to raise the issue of "unhealthy rhetoric" among Ukrainian government officials.
The Crocus City Hall terror attack, which took place on March 22, prompted some observers to revisit Danilov's brags about the Kiev regime's ability to bring "the war" inside Russia.
"I want to say that if Putin believed that the war would not come to Russia, he is deeply mistaken. It will come and it will come quite far. And if today they are already beginning to suffer at a distance of 800-900 kilometers, believe me, in the near future it will be thousands of kilometers," Danilov said on March 14 during the Ukrainska Pravda talk show, while commenting on the Russian border incursions by the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps* and other mercenary units fighting on the side of the Kiev regime.
"I think that the firing of Danilov brings attention to an issue no one is paying attention to," Johnson said, referring to the US and Western mainstream media attempts to divert attention from Ukraine's possible role in the Crocus City Hall terror attack.
However, initial data received from those arrested for the terror attack confirms links to Ukraine, Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov said on March 26.
"The primary data we received from the detainees confirms this. Therefore, we will further finalize the information that should show us whether the presence and participation of the Ukrainian side is real or not. In any case, for now there is reason to say that this is exactly the case," Bortnikov told reporter Pavel Zarubin on Tuesday.
Zelensky's decision to reshuffle his cabinet is yet another "dumb political move" amid a string of defeats sustained by the Ukrainian military on the ground, according to Johnson.
"It’s chaos. And, I think in recent days the Ukrainians are taking steps to hide a lot of casualties that have been inflicted through a variety of Russian missile strikes on key command centers," the CIA veteran concluded.
*a terrorist organization banned in Russia.