Valerii Zaluzhny has been blamed for last year’s anticlimactic counteroffensive against Russian troops
Rumours and allegations have swirled in recent weeks over the dismissal of Valerii Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s army chief.Last week, several lawmakers and insiders claimed the taciturn and immensely popular 50-year-old four-star general was dismissed and set to lead Ukraine’s National Security and Defence
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided to fire him in early December after Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv, the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper reported, citing an unnamed source.But on Monday, Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said: “This is not true.”Even though the ministry does not hold sway over Zaluzhny, in the case of a potential firing, it would have to submit a “recommendation” for his dismissal to Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s nominal commander-in-chief.“There’s nothing to talk about. There was no dismissal. I have nothing to add,” Zelenskyy’s spokesperson Serhiy Nikiforov said in televised remarks on Monday..
Popular despite counteroffensive failures
Several counterstrikes in late 2022 liberated almost half of Russia-occupied areas and assured the Ukrainian public that the 2023 summer campaign in the east and south would succeed. But Russia used a lull in hostilities to build multilayer defence installations along the 1,000km-long (621-mile) front line and deployed hundreds of thousands of newly mobilised servicemen to man them.
Zaluzhny’s months-long counterattack morphed into a World War I-like trench war as his forces gained, lost and regained tiny patches of land amid harrowing losses of soldiers and Western-supplied weaponry.
Even the failed mutiny and disbandment of the Wagner mercenary group, which spearheaded Russia’s advance, didn’t help the Ukrainian counterattacks.
The failure was variously blamed on Zaluzhny’s tactical mistakes and delays in the supply of Western weaponry such as fighter jets and missiles.
As Zaluzhny has not come up with a new action plan for 2024, Zelenskyy has occasionally bypassed him in managing the armed forces, Fesenko said.
But Zaluzhny’s authority among the top brass and servicemen remains sky high.
In early 2022, as Ukrainian politicians were adamant that Russian President Vladimir Putin was bluffing and would not dare invade, Zaluzhny, who has headed the armed forces since July 2021, worked hard to prepare.
