The message about the alleged resignation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny shook up Ukrainian society. And even when the information was absurdly refuted, questions and irritation remained.
Information that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky allegedly fired the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny on the evening of Monday, January 29, instantly spread across social networks and the media. Individual journalists and politicians from different camps immediately began to confirm it, Deutsche Welle notes.
Ukrainian journalist Roman Tsymbalyuk directly wrote on his page on the social network Facebook: “The President of Ukraine appointed Kirill Budanov instead of Valery Zaluzhny.” And people’s deputy from the opposition “European Solidarity” Alexey Goncharenko said in his Telegram channel that he also received information about the dismissal of Valery Zaluzhny and that the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was allegedly offered the post of ambassador to one of the European countries, but he refused.
The message about Zaluzhny’s alleged dismissal was also spread by Goncharenko’s faction colleague Victoria Syumar, former people’s deputy Borislav Bereza, editor-in-chief of the publication LB.ua Sonya Koshkina and others. The publication ZN.UA, citing sources in the OP and Zaluzhny’s entourage, wrote that Zelensky suggested that the commander-in-chief write a report on his dismissal, but did not offer another significant position that he could occupy. “Yes, there was such a proposal. For his part, Zaluzhny replied that it is the right of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief to decide with whom to work,” the publication quotes its sources. According to the procedure, in order to remove the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces from office by presidential decree, the presentation of the Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov is necessary.
This information took many by surprise, because on Monday afternoon Zelensky and Zaluzhny appeared publicly together for the first time in a long time at Askold’s grave in Kyiv to honor the memory of the Heroes of Krut. Ukraine celebrates the Day of Remembrance of Heroes of Krut on January 29. On this day in 1918, Ukrainian units, who were trying to stop the Bolshevik advance towards Kyiv, took part in an unequal battle near Kruty. About 30 fighters of the Ukrainian student hundred, while trying to escape the encirclement, were captured by the Bolsheviks and were executed. They were buried near Askold's grave in Kyiv.
The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine reacted quite quickly, but very strangely and ambiguously, to the message about Zaluzhny’s resignation, publishing an appeal to journalists in its Telegram channel: “Dear journalists, we immediately answer everyone: No, this is not true,” the department said in a telegram message. channel. Later, the press secretary of the head of state, Sergei Nikiforov, in a comment to Public also denied Zaluzhny’s resignation. “There is no subject of conversation, there was no dismissal, I can’t say anything more,” he said in a comment to Public.
Late in the evening, Valery Zaluzhny himself posted a joint photo with Chief of the General Staff Sergei Shaptala on his Facebook page without a caption. Subscribers gave this photo more than 22 thousand likes and left hundreds of comments with support and gratitude to the general.
Tensions between Zelensky and Zaluzhny
However, the existence of contradictions between the president and the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has been discussed for a long time in Ukraine and abroad. A number of media outlets, in particular Ukrayinska Pravda and some Western publications, reported about a possible conflict between Zaluzhny and the Office of the President last year.
Then they predicted Zaluzhny’s removal from office, because Bankova was allegedly alarmed by Zaluzhny’s high political rating. They say that Ukrainians identify the army not with Supreme Commander-in-Chief Zelensky, but with General Zaluzhny.
But, according to journalists, Valery Zaluzhny is worried about the change of leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine without his knowledge and strategic disagreements on the conduct of hostilities. Zaluzhny’s article, distributed by The Economist magazine in early November, was also criticized by the Office of the President. In it, he noted that a stalemate had developed at the front and both sides now lacked the strength to defeat the enemy, and therefore Ukraine needed some kind of technological breakthrough in order to get out of this impasse.
However, then both the president and the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in every possible way denied differences and assured that the military and political leadership of Ukraine are one team. However, in December last year, a petition was registered on the president’s website demanding that politicians not interfere in the affairs of the military. “Constant attacks on the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Fedorovich Zaluzhny by politicians undermine confidence in the military leadership not only of the population of Ukraine, but also among the Armed Forces of Ukraine itself,” says the petition, which has collected more than 28 thousand signatures out of the required 25 thousand. However, the president has not yet considered it that way.
Political scientist Igor Reiterovich from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv believes that there was a controlled leak of information about Zaluzhny’s likely resignation in order to test public opinion regarding the real dismissal of the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He does not rule out that public reaction and the non-public position of international partners restrained the president from dismissing Zaluzhny.
“The president’s office probably decided to suspend this story with Zaluzhny’s dismissal for now; they probably didn’t like it (the way the public reacted to the message - Ed.). Because all this is being discussed in stores, on the streets, on social networks, and there has not been a single positive response or commentary on such an action. Everyone is categorically against it, everyone has a question: what are the grounds for dismissal? The Office of the President has not yet found any arguments,” Reiterovich told DW.
But the former chief military prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Chumak, believes that responsibility for the consequences of military-political decisions and the results of the war lies solely with the president. Chumak suggests that Zelensky has his own vision of the development of the situation, in particular this applies to personnel. “Public opinion” did not allow him to do this. We are all smart, but answer him. History will show whether this will benefit or harm the interests of the country,” Viktor Chumak wrote on Facebook.
“What we know for sure” - BBC about the meeting at Bankova on January 29
According to BBC Ukraine, on the afternoon of Monday, January 29, Valery Zaluzhny was informed that the president wanted to see him: Vladimir Zelensky allegedly wanted to discuss the situation at the front with the commander-in-chief.
He immediately went to Bankovaya. This meeting promised to be atypical. Despite the fact that Zelensky and Zaluzhny regularly see each other at meetings of the commander-in-chief’s headquarters, they have not communicated for quite some time without the presence of the head of the President’s Office. On this day, Andriy Ermak was in Uzhgorod for negotiations with the head of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Peter Szijjarto.
According to the BBC, the meeting on Bankova included three people: Vladimir Zelensky, Valery Zaluzhny and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov. The meeting, BBC sources say, took place in a completely calm tone. Quite soon, the president moved on to her main topic: he announced that he had decided to dismiss the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Zelensky added that a decree on this will be signed in the near future.
After six in the evening, information about Zaluzhny’s dismissal begins to actively spread on social networks. It spreads through two parallel channels.
On the one hand, it was actively distributed by anonymous telegram channels that are associated with the Office of the President. Representatives of Bankova have repeatedly denied their involvement in them, but these channels are often the first to report exclusives from the bowels of the presidential administration, and their representatives are invited to off-record meetings in the President’s Office.
In the end, even the BBC’s interlocutors on Bankova said that in the communications unit of the OP there is a certain group of employees who supervise anonymous telegram channels. On the other hand, this - also with reference to their own sources - was reported by people and channels who were difficult to suspect of sympathy for Zelensky.
Of course, the tone of these messages was completely different. The first ones noted that nothing terrible was happening in the country, and there was no need to “rock the boat” over this resignation. The second group complained and predicted various problems for the Office of the President.
After seven in the evening, a number of influential Ukrainian media reported Zaluzhny’s resignation as a fait accompli, citing their own sources. At 19:41, approximately an hour and a half after reports on this topic appeared, a government agency issued the first statement on this matter. This was a strange message from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. A little earlier, at 19:23, the head of the press and information department of the Ministry of Defense, Illarion Pavlyuk, in a comment to the BBC, said that he did not confirm Zaluzhny’s resignation.
At 20:05, Vladimir Zelensky’s press secretary Sergei Nikiforov told Ukrainskaya Pravda that “the president definitely did not fire the commander in chief.”
Finally, at 20:20, the President’s Office released Vladimir Zelensky’s daily address. There was not a word in it about a meeting with the commander-in-chief or about his resignation. Only at this moment it became more or less clear that January 29 would not be Valery Zaluzhny’s last day of work.
The Air Force was also looking for answers to two questions
- Firstly, why did the president decide to fire Zaluzhny right now?
- The second thing we don’t know is what exactly prevented the presidential decree from appearing after he announced his personnel decision to Zaluzhny.
As for the first, BBC interlocutors in the highest corridors of Ukrainian power admit: problems between the military and political leadership began in April 2022, as soon as Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv.
Now Zelensky does not restrain himself from making harsh, bordering on disparaging statements towards the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And MP from the presidential party Maryana Bezuglaya, who is associated with Ermak, openly criticizes him on social networks.
Some commentators believe that we are talking about Bankova’s jealousy of Valery Zaluzhny’s incredibly high levels of trust and support, whom sociologists are already calling Zelensky’s only real competitor in a hypothetical presidential election.
Others point out that since a certain time Zaluzhny and Zelensky have had an excellent vision of what phase the war has entered and how it should develop further.
As for the second, the BBC’s interlocutors in power voiced two main options for answering this question (we do not take into account the version defended by some observers that Bankova was afraid of a loud negative reaction from social network users).
According to the first of them, Kyiv’s Western partners intervened in the situation and expressed strong opposition to Zaluzhny’s resignation.
This version can be substantiated quite easily. Ukraine is now completely dependent on Western military and financial assistance. Moreover, the coming days promise to be critical in the process of providing Kyiv with multibillion-dollar tranches of both European and American support.
At the same time, foreign media report that Western leaders are persistently advising Kyiv to switch to strategic defense - that is, in fact, to implement the strategy of which Valery Zaluzhny is a supporter.
The dismissal of the commander-in-chief, and even not coordinated with the West, could well become the reason for Zelensky’s “veto” on this decision. And the West, apparently, has sufficient leverage to insist on its position on this issue.
The second reason that could prevent the appearance of the decree on Zaluzhny’s resignation is the problem with the appointment of a new commander in chief. Ukrainian media name two main contenders for this position: we are talking about the current head of the Main Intelligence Directorate, Kirill Budanov, and the commander of the Ground Forces, Alexander Syrsky.
However, Air Force sources in military circles say that both generals are not eager to take Zaluzhny’s chair and have refused this appointment. The problem, say BBC interlocutors, is that any new commander-in-chief will automatically be compared with the old, mega-popular Valery Zaluzhny.
The results of a sociological survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), conducted in December last year, indicate that the vast majority of Ukrainians - 72 percent - would have a negative attitude towards the possible resignation of Valery Zaluzhny from the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. 92% of Ukrainians trust Zaluzhny, 60% trust Budanov, 33% trust Syrsky
On the possible consequences of the “big telegram policy” of the OP
The scandal surrounding the large-scale leak of information about the alleged resignation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhny, although not confirmed, made it possible to assess the full depth of the big telegram policy of the current political government, writes the publication “Passion”.
Since last week, the same telegram has been circulating various lists of future “big” personnel changes. The channels controlled by the OP scattered hints about high-profile events and prepared the information ground for high-profile decisions. The central element of these hints and leaks was Bankova’s desired dismissal of Zaluzhny.
The scale of jealousy over the level of public trust in the general, the unconditional faith of the leadership of the OP in the political ambitions of the general and the night terrors in the form of tables of sociological surveys regarding future elections (which are also not yet expected at all) turned his resignation into the meaning of life for the inhabitants of Bankova.
Sometimes, looking at how zealously, to the delight of Russian propaganda, the OP himself confirmed all its hostile narratives about the conflict between the commander-in-chief and the president, a persistent idea arose that the war had already ended happily. And domestic politics has again become the meaning of life.
But the problem is that the war has not gone away. And, in particular, the front looks at these news and interviews with wide eyes. As well as Ukraine’s strategic allies.
On January 29, judging by the dynamics of the situation, the authorities tried to probe public sentiment by leaking information that Zaluzhny had been fired. And obviously a little upset. After all, a real storm has arisen in the information space. To quench which they sent someone who was not at all sorry - the Presidential Press Secretary Sergei Nikiforov. Who told the people that no one fired anyone.
Moreover, this all happened, by and large, only on social networks.
After which the upset office fired another salvo with its favorite torpedoes with crap - deputy Maryana Bezugla and directly controlled telegram channels. Bezuglaya unleashed absolutely rude rudeness towards Zaluzhny with hints of alcohol consumption.
And the telegram contained a message in Russian: “Valera, don’t become Prigozhin.” After which the curtain can be lowered altogether. Because such open disdain for the commander-in-chief in particular and the Ukrainian army in general is, frankly speaking, shocking
An attempt to discredit Zaluzhny in this way causes disgust. Like everything this deputy has been producing lately. But when the government’s political strategists went so far as to compare General Zaluzhny with the thieves and war criminal Prigozhin, and the Ukrainian army with the “Wagner” gang, this is beyond good and evil.
Obviously, the political authorities, to put it mildly, did not risk dismissing Zaluzhny after seeing the public reaction. And out of disappointment and awareness of her inability to realize what she wanted, she stupidly began to spit bile, showing her true face.
However, this does not mean that dismissal is impossible. State leaders can overcome their own fears and put the finishing touches on the situation. But what has been done cannot be undone - everyone has seen everything.
And I would like to separately note the fact that telegrams were used on a large scale for this “special operation” to free Zaluzhny. The same telegram that the day before CIA analysts were even forbidden to open on their own computers. Because the Russian network, in addition to being purely public, also carries technical threats.
But this is the CIA. What do they know about politics? In our latitudes, the Russian “cart”, which the authorities have quite deliberately replaced traditional media and uses in their own interests, has been turned almost into a key element of the information field.
The variety of television channels was nailed down by the “telethon” along with television itself as a phenomenon. Electronic media moved from Olympus by telegram. And the fact that this is an absolutely Russian toy, which the Russian General Staff will not let anyone play with just like that, was somehow forgotten.
Let's just say it's a strange story.
