Crisis in the Ukrainian Military: The Growing Tension and Implications for the Future

The main scandal of the past week in Ukraine was the statement of the Deputy Head of the National Security and Defense Parliamentary Committee, Mariana Bezuhl, about the need for the resignation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny.

Who will be the victim: Zelensky, the generals, the system?

“The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine could not provide a vision plan for 2024. The military simply said that they need to collect at least 20,000 citizens per month,” Bezuhla wrote on Facebook, arguing his claim.

According to her, the problem was outlined already in the summer, during the state budget formation period. “We asked what to plan? How do you see the war? Do you pledge funds for rotation and demobilization? What about learning? What about rotations? Why is there no procurement of bandages at all in 2024, for example? You understand that one death costs the country 15 million hryvnia, but a bandage 10,000 times less? Except for the tragedy of the death as such… This discussion was not public, but the tension grew,” the deputy wrote.

It turns out that there was a “we”, there was a “tension” that “grew up”, and grew to such a degree that a member of the presidential faction made a public demand to the public: “If the military leadership cannot provide any plan for 2024, but all their mobilization proposals are reduced to the fact that more people are needed without any offer to change the system of the armed forces of Ukraine, then such leadership must leave,” writes “Postimees.ee”.

It should be noted that one must have courage to throw such a challenge to General Zaluzhny. Today he is the most popular person in Ukraine. Because of this, Bezuhl’s opponents have started to call him crazy on social networks. However, her “we” and “rising tensions” show that she is a pioneer in criticizing the Ukrainian military high command, but she is far from the only one.

Today, the general’s audacity is almost met with obstruction. Colleagues have announced their intention to appeal to the leader of the “Servant of the People” faction of the party with the demand to exclude him from their ranks.

The head of a well-known public organization even wrote a statement to the Security Service of Ukraine: about the disclosure of a state secret, and a knowingly false statement about threats to the safety of citizens.

But Zelensky’s office is silent. Moreover, according to Zaluzhny’s article in “The Economist”, in which he announced a stalemate in hostilities, Zelensky publicly disagreed with him. And then there was General Dmitry Marchenko’s TV interview that he would “really like” Zaluzhny to be nominated as president, agreeing that Ukraine needs a “military president”, “a person with the experience of Charles de Gaulle”.

It is clear that not for nothing after that, in an interview with “The Sun”, President Zelensky openly stated that military personnel who are going to engage in politics should not “engage in war”.

Last week, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Alexey Danilov, published an article in which he announced the Kremlin’s “informational campaign on the artificial creation and demonstration of an allegedly existing conflict in the country’s top military-political leadership” in Ukraine. However, after Bezuhla’s post and the subsequent events, one gets the impression that there is a conflict after all. And it is hidden not even in the presidential ambitions of Zaluzhny or Zelensky, but in the system of the armed forces of Ukraine, which has become a demotivator for the mobilization of prisoners of war and in which some politicians see the reason for the ineffectiveness of the summer counteroffensive.

And the longer the war drags on, the longer the military collects the 20,000 people Bezuhla wrote about every month, the more urgent the question will become: who is to blame? You can blame the system and start changing it. But you can call the generals or Zelensky guilty, then either the first or the second will win, but the country will lose. For now, efforts to change the system cause resistance from the generals and the politicians who are already oriented towards it.

The intelligence service warns

Unlike the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine or, for example, the British intelligence service, which systematically publishes its reports on the Russian-Ukrainian war, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine rarely makes itself known. The head of the foreign intelligence service, Alexander Litvinenko, published a column last week where he talked about Russia’s global plans and goals, in which the war in Ukraine turns out to be just one of the steps to the global redistribution of the world.

“Putin is convinced that the recovery of Ukraine and the rest of the “historic Russian lands” and the restoration of the empire can only be done within the framework of a global redistribution of the world. Such a redistribution may last 10 to 15 years, accompanied by conflicts of various scales and intensity, possibly with the use of nuclear weapons. In addition, the war against Ukraine is perceived by the Kremlin as an important but not the only front for Russia, which is actually waging a world war with the US and the West in general,” Litvinenko wrote.

As the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service emphasized, one of the Kremlin’s tasks is to build an alternative “majority coalition” to the West. It is the “Global South +” format, which should promote alternative models (political, economic, financial, humanitarian, values, etc.) to the West. The goal is to turn the West from a world leader into one, “normalize” it, and then, including through nuclear blackmail, break the will of the Western elite, convince them that they will lose and should retreat peacefully. The main role here would be the strengthening of the military power of Russia, China and other “majority coalition” countries.

Among the Kremlin’s main tasks for the implementation of this plan, Litvinenko also mentions preparation for the upcoming aggression against Moldova and the former Soviet Baltic states.

“After the expulsion of Russian spy diplomats, Russian citizens are actively infiltrating European countries, first of all in the South, with their own agency, creating companies, NGOs, etc. There are signs of preparing a subversive operational infrastructure for a major war (an approach used during the USSR),” writes Foreign Intelligence Service service manager.

If you objectively analyze the policy of Russia and China for the expansion of BRICS, for example, Moscow’s stormy activities in Africa, the actual support of the Kremlin to “Hamas”, and ultimately the growing Russian military budget for the next few years, then you can conclude that all this is aimed at the implementation of much broader ambitions, and not simply the conquest of Ukraine. So – 10 to 15 years! If the democratic world does not break the backbone of Putin’s regime earlier, says Ukrainian journalist and writer Sergej Garmash.

2023-11-30 03:34:00
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