Ukraine’s acting president Volodymyr Zelensky announced last night the dumping of yet another top official, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Oleksandr Syrsky. Unlike last week’s dismissals, when the prime minister and the defense minister were shown the door, ousting Syrsky does not appear to have been in Zelensky’s initial plans. Zelensky had portrayed the situation when he dumped his young, tech-savvy proponent of drone warfare, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, known as Palantir’s man in Kiev, as necessitated by a conflict between Fedorov and Syrsky. However, on Monday, Syrsky questioned that narrative, saying, “It was a surprise for me to learn that the Minister and I had a conflict. I perceived our relationship as a working one.”
It turns out that very little of Zelensky’s offered narrative actually made any sense. Various coverage within Ukraine contends that his decision to dump Fedorov was primarily based upon the latter’s popularity rising quickly, leaving Zelensky’s in the dust. Fedorov, formerly the Minister of Digital Transformation, in his six months as Defense Minister, was the champion of drone warfare, robotic systems, and the like. This, and therefore he, was the supposed reason for Ukraine’s “turning the tables on Russia.” Zelensky has attempted to thus disrupt the ”magic” attached to Fedorov, a “magic” also associated with a purported diminished need to grab Ukrainian males off the streets to be put into the army’s meat-grinder—more drones, fewer conscripts.
Syrsky and other field commanders had insisted that more conscripts were needed and that Fedorov had failed to deliver. But Zelensky’s initial appointment of national police chief (minister of internal affairs) Ihor Klymenko to replace Fedorov and toughen up the conscription process, helped trigger large demonstrations in Kiev and other cities against Klymenko (and Syrsky) and in support of Fedorov. Zelensky then appointed security service (SBU) head Khmara as minister of defense instead. Many of the demonstrators, collectively called “liberals” or “Sorosites,” are, or have been, beneficiaries of Western NGO funding. At the same time, there have been demonstrations of a different type—a rising number of incidents, like violent clashes in the western Ukraine city of Lviv this month, in which people attacked conscription officers while trying to defend young men against “busification,” which means being hauled away in a van and sent to the front.
Not to be discounted as another factor in the Kiev demonstrations, is competition over incoming EU funding. The massive funds and accompanying corruption are shifting from ‘old-line’ military-supply types of contracts to ‘Silicon Valley’ types, both inside Ukraine and abroad. Strana had reported that Zelensky was concerned about Fedorov’s ties to circles close to the Europe-allied National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), with which Zelensky clashed last year but finally backed down.
