President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy – Ansa
You say that war increases the perception of danger, but the line between fear and paranoia is so fine that caution is sometimes confused with willfulness. Depending on the faction, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy has been accused of one or the other attitude. Sometimes both.
In recent weeks, recalls, suspensions, referrals to the courts have multiplied the questions. Zelenskyy knows he is a “dead man walking,” a death row inmate who must measure his steps to keep them away from the killers. Its physical elimination is not just a hypothesis.
On the first day of the war, February 24, a team of Kremlin hitmen was neutralized by the Presidential Guard in Kyiv. Without Zelenskyy, everything would have been easier for Putin. It would have left a people without references and a country one step away from conquest.
The effect was the opposite: the forces, even of the toughest opposition, to coagulate around the head of state, to make him the main symbol of the resistance. Attempts to eliminate it have been repeated since then. Thus began an internal war to track down Russian collaborators, supporters and Russian spies who had infiltrated Ukraine’s public machinery. Vladimir Putin has never officially denied rumors that he would give the order to kill the former comedian.
Using the arms of the army and those of communications, he instead taunted the rising tsar, who gushed about a brief campaign to conquer Ukraine, but nearly six months of war seeped into Donbass separatists in the areas he had essentially controlled in the past and Crimea , which Moscow unilaterally and illegally annexed in 2014. Ever since the first failed rounds of negotiations, when Kyiv sent the front lines of diplomacy and Putin delegated his third tier of government with no real bargaining power, there was talk of the disappearance of one of his negotiators in the Ukrainian capital, who was discovered in dangerous relations with Moscow.
Among the latest to fall in chronological order was the commander of the Kyiv army’s special forces, Grigory Galagan, who was accused of not doing enough to defend the country. On July 9th, the Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary in five countries were again dismissed by presidential decree: Germany, Hungary, Norway, the Czech Republic and India. Among them was Andrii Melnyk, the representative in Berlin who had repeatedly criticized the German authorities for the slowness of arms shipments to Ukraine.
The changes in forced stages strengthen Zelenskyy’s entourage, but convey the image of a fragile and porous system of government. Among those dismissed is the head of the security service Ivan Bakanov, who was dismissed under “Article 47 of the Disciplinary Statute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” according to an official statement, which speaks of “failure to perform service duties” that resulted in human casualties or other serious ones consequences or posed a threat ».
It previously replaced Iryna Venediktova, who served as Attorney General and prosecuted thousands of war crimes cases committed by Russian forces. Sometimes officials were involved in the parades that made it big. Like Lyudmila Denisova, Commissioner for Human Rights, who is accused by the government of Kyiv of inflating the reports of many international press organs (Avvenire, along with some others, hardly relied on the information of this office at the time, ed.).
To date, more than 1,400 court cases are pending against suspected Moscow accomplices. There will be a Presidential Decree in the coming days to determine what constitutes illegal conduct. Also in order not to desert the same circle of a president whose personal fate does not depend on the outcome of the war. As long as Putin is in power, Zelensky and his family will never really be safe.