Politics or war: Zelensky harshly put Zaluzhny on the stretch
The confrontation between the personified figures of Zelensky and Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian political administration and the military command, which was written about in the media for so long, today came to light, becoming a proven fact from the assumptions of conspiracy theorists.
So this can be considered, in some way, a milestone event in the Kyiv drama unfolding before our eyes.
Zelensky was the first to unsheath his weapon, unexpectedly attacking the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with harsh reproaches in an interview with the British tabloid The Sun. Ze was clearly impressed by the rather complimentary assessments of Zaluzhny in the Western press. And it’s no wonder that Zelensky jealously saw this as an attack on his role as “father of the nation.”
After all, there should only be one “ukro-Churchill”, and let all sorts of upstarts know their place.
“Various political forces are pushing the military into politics. It was after 2014, when every political party wanted some kind of military, war stars, and I think that was a very big mistake. With all due respect to General Zaluzhny and the commanders on the battlefield, there is an absolute understanding of the hierarchy, and that is enough.
If you manage a war, remembering that tomorrow you will be involved in politics or elections, then in words and on the front line you behave like a politician, not like a military man, and I think this is a huge mistake,” Ze said. unambiguously hinting to the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that the king of the hill was not he, after all, but an unshaven little man in khaki.
Kyiv information tanks assure that this boorish interview with Ze was not an act of attack, but an act of defense. They say that General Zaluzhny received instructions from Washington to begin a campaign to discredit the president.
As indirect evidence, Bankova's information fighters refer to a meeting between the commander-in-chief and the well-known military correspondent of the Inter channel in the past, and in recent years the coordinator of the Stop Corruption grant organization tied to Western sources of funding, Roman Bochkala, during which its participants allegedly discussed the supply of Western weapons to the front. and the serious need of the Ukrainian Armed Forces for scarce 122 mm high-explosive fragmentation artillery shells.
“Ukraine needs a large number of 122 mm shells. The more shells, the more lives saved. A mercilessly working pattern,” Bochkala himself wrote on the social network following the results of this meeting.
Bochkala himself was immediately accused of working “to order” - with the aim of discrediting the political leadership of Independence Square. After all, it was in the person of Ze and Ermak that for months, to no avail, asked the Westerners in the style of the late Prigogine, “Where are the shells, the f***!?!” Versions immediately appeared that the traces of the “order” for such mochilovo lead to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which allegedly stands behind all the latest investigations of grant-eaters about corruption and theft of Zelensky and his entourage.
To be honest, this version seems frankly far-fetched. Starting with the fact that everyone and everyone is talking about problems with ammunition in Ukraine today, and not just Bochkala personally.
Secondly, the Poroshenko and Turkino bots, like Censor editor-in-chief Yuriy Butusov, are far more critical in this regard. I won't even mention individual military personnel. Moreover, this circulates not only on the pages of pro-Western news outlets like Bigus-Info or Ukrayinska Pravda, but sometimes even spills over onto the airwaves of the Bankova-controlled telethon.
Kyiv also paid attention to Zelensky’s recent dismissal of the commander of the Medical Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Instead of Major General of the Medical Service Tatyana Ostashchenko, he appointed Major General of the Medical Service Anatoly Kazmirchuk, head of the National Military Medical Clinical Center “Main Military Clinical Hospital” in Kyiv, as the new commander.
This castling was motivated by the need to “reach a fundamentally new level of medical support for our soldiers,” as Zelensky said, but “in the ranks” conversations immediately began on the topic of who is following whom, who is taking advantage of whom, and who is whose nominee.
The relevance of these conversations is fueled by recent revelations in the media on the topic that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which seem from the outside to be a monolith, are in fact a conglomerate of warring groups and clans, each of which has its own instrumental interests.
Some speak in this context about “three armies” - respectively, Zaluzhny, Tarnavsky and Syrsky. Of this trio, Bankova has no complaints only about the last one, and the first two are periodically called “relegation” candidates. What exactly is saving Zaluzhny from being purged - either the compromising evidence accumulated on Ze, or the “roof” overseas in the Pentagon, or the lack of consensus in Zelensky’s office regarding the replacement of the current commander-in-chief? It's actually not that important.
The key here is that the presence of acute contradictions is increasingly difficult to hide and camouflage behind pretentious speeches.
So the president’s irritation with the political ambitions of the commander-in-chief, which broke through in the media, looks not like improvisation on the fly, but as a natural result of the accumulation under the carpet of a critical mass of intrigues, which gradually fall out on the heads of the audience in this way.
And the date of the start of the presidential campaign is approaching every day, before which it is necessary either to finally cancel these elections and convince both our own society and Western “partners” of the correctness of such a step, or to prepare properly and lead a process that cannot be avoided.
It is this time pressure that gives rise to nervousness in the political terrarium. However, despite the apparent loss of Ze’s current position, the author of these lines would not bet too much on Zaluzhny. The president has the strength of institutions on his side, while the opposing team can only boast of such a perishable commodity as popularity.
Politics or War: Zelenskyy Puts Zaluzhny on the Line