In an interview with TG1 director Gian Marco Chiocci released on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky he said who is considering replacing key officials in the army and state apparatus. His response came after Chiocci had asked him to comment on the possible dismissal of the commander of the Ukrainian armed forces Valery Zaluzhnyi, a hypothesis taken up by many Ukrainian and international newspapers in recent days. The relationship between Zaluzhnyi and Zelensky is described as bad and the two are said to disagree on how to carry out the defense war against Russia. Zelensky neither confirmed nor denied the possibility of Zaluzhnyi’s dismissal, but said he was considering a broader change in the country’s leadership:
Surely a reset, a new beginning, is necessary. I mean a replacement of a series of state leaders, not just a single sector such as the military. I’m reflecting on this replacement, it’s true, but you can’t say “well, we replaced a single person and now we can start again”. […] If we want to win we must all push in the same direction, convinced of victory, we cannot be discouraged, […] regardless of the negative moods that may overtake us at certain moments.
With this sentence Zelensky could be referring to the fact that in November in an interview withEconomist Zaluzhnyi these that the war with the Russians had reached “a stalemate”, contradicting the public optimism of the Ukrainian president. Zelensky’s staff publicly criticized Zaluzhnyi’s choice of words.
However, it is likely that his comment also refers more generally to the wear and tear of the Ukrainian ruling class and the tiredness of the population, two years after the start of the Russian invasion and without certain prospects for the developments of the war. Since the beginning of the war, and also in the last interview with TG1, Zelensky has always talked about how keeping morale high and being optimistic and determined was important to win against Russia, but in the last period this has become increasingly difficult also due to the few results obtained during the counteroffensive launched in the summer by the Ukrainian army. According to some reconstructions, Zelensky would attribute responsibility for the crime to Zaluzhnyi failure of this counteroffensive.
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