2024-02-08T17:28:46+00:00
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/ Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustam Umarov announced on Thursday the dismissal of Army Commander General Valeriy Zaluzhny from his post and the appointment of General Oleksandr Syrsky as the new Army Commander.
“Today a decision was made to change the leadership of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. I am sincerely grateful to Valery Fedorovich (Zalugny) for all his achievements and victories,” Umarov wrote on social media, according to Agence France-Presse.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had asked Zaluzhny to “stay on his team,” while the military commander, who has led Kyiv’s forces since Russia’s invasion of the country began nearly two years ago, acknowledged that his country’s strategy had to “change and adapt.”
Zelensky said in an interview broadcast last Sunday that he was considering a “reset” to replace several senior officials.
Speculation has been rife in Ukraine for weeks over suggestions that the president was about to sack the country’s popular army chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny. The two have been at odds over the country’s performance in the nearly two-year-old war that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But Zelensky said any changes would go beyond replacing one person to focus efforts on expelling Russian forces.
“When I talk about change, I have in mind something serious, not about one person, but about the direction of the country’s leadership,” Zelensky told Italian broadcaster RAI when asked about Zaluzhny.
“It’s a question of who will lead Ukraine. A reset is necessary, I’m talking about replacing a number of state leaders, not just in the military,” he added.
Differences have emerged since Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year made limited gains against Russian forces positioned along a 1,000-kilometre front line in southern and eastern Ukraine.
In an article for The Economist last November, Zalughni said the war had entered a new phase of attrition. This earned him a rebuke from the president.
Zaluzhny won the admiration of Ukrainians for overseeing the pushback of Russian forces toward Kiev early in the war and subsequent advances that reclaimed large swaths of territory in the south and northeast.
On two occasions last week, Ukrainian media outlets issued a barrage of reports suggesting that Zaluzhny’s dismissal was imminent. In at least one case, the president’s spokesman denied that the army chief had been replaced.
Questions have also been raised about who might replace him, with the two leading potential candidates being Oleksandr Syrsky, commander of the ground forces, and Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian defence ministry’s intelligence department.