A Rift at Ukraine’s Top Comes Amid the Bloodiest Fighting Yet in Two-Year War

The dispute between President Zelensky of Ukraine and his top military commander, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, comes right at the bloodiest period of fighting in the nearly two-year-old war. With Ukrainian troops dug in on the defensive, Russia is launching a winter offensive that is costing 1,000 Russian casualties a day. In January, Russia gained only 56 square miles, reports Harvard’s Belfer Center — at the price of 473 men killed or wounded per square mile.Far from this blood-soaked ground, President Putin drives his generals forward with an eye on two audiences, one domestic, the other foreign. He demands military “victories” to present to Russians on February 24, the second anniversary of the war, and on the weekend of March 15, when Russians vote to give him a fifth six-year term. That would make his total tenure in Kremlin longer than Stalin’s.The second audience are Ukraine’s western backers. Defying reports of “Ukraine fatigue,” the European Union last week approved $54 billion in aid to Ukraine. Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands have agreed to give to Ukraine this year almost all their F-16 fighter jets.However, in America, $60 billion aid is held up by a swing group of Republican legislators in Congress. President Trump, still smarting over charges that Mr. Putin helped his 2016 campaign, has instructed his congressional followers to block new aid to Ukraine.President Zelensky, center, visits Zaporizhzhia region, the site of fierce battles with the Russian troops in Ukraine, February 4, 2024. Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via APToday, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is at Moscow for a sit down interview with Mr. Putin. Last August, when Mr. Carlson posted on X his interview with Mr. Trump, it drew about 22 million views, almost double the views of Republican Presidential debate, which aired simultaneously.Mr. Carlson, who regularly sports a bow tie, regularly derides the olive green suited Ukrainian president as “the manager of a Ukrainian strip club.” Last week, retired Australian major general, Mick Ryan, warned in his Futura Doctrina blog: “There may be some, particularly in the U.S. Congress, who could exploit a change in the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and any public fallout afterwards, as additional evidence for why they shouldn’t support further packages of U.S. assistance for Ukraine.”Behind Ukraine’s poor timing is personalities. Before becoming president in 2019, Mr. Zelensky rose to the top of the Russian-speaking comedy and theater world by keeping a close eye on his audiences. Two months ago, a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 62 percent of Ukrainians trust Mr. Zelensky, down from 84 percent at the start of the war. By contrast, the same poll found that trust in General Zaluzhnyi was a sky-high 88 percent. The same poll found that 72 percent of Ukrainians would view the firing of General Zaluzhnyi negatively, with only 2 percent seeing it positively. Jealousy is the reason why in 1946 Stalin exiled to Odessa Marshal Zhukov, the main architect of Soviet victory in World War II.There are also policy differences. They recall President Truman’s 1951 sacking General MacArthur in the middle of the Korean War. In contemporary Ukraine, the split is over General Zaluzhnyi’s use of the word “stalemate” in an interview last fall with the Economist. Looking forward to 2024, the split now is over the General’s request to draft up to 500,000 more men to stave off Russia’s million man army. With an expanded draft bill moving slowly through Ukraine’s Rada, or Parliament, Mr. Zelensky clearly worries about the political price.In turn, General Zaluzhnyi reportedly believes that the president is failing in his job of winning crucial military aid from Western countries. Along the 600-mile front line, a severe artillery shell shortage means that Ukrainians are firing one shell for every five shells fired by the Russians. North Korea, a country with an arms industry built to Soviet standards, is sending trainloads of artillery shells to European Russia from Vladivostok. Europe says its industry cannot meet its promise of 1 million shells for Ukraine.Once again, Ukrainians are improvising. In a move supported by Ukraine’s high command, Mr. Zelensky has set a target of producing at least 1 million military drones this year. To use First Person View, or FPV drones, an operator dons goggles and guides bombs to their targets. Increasingly, Ukrainian drone manufacturers integrate artificial intelligence and jamming avoidance systems. This has increased the kill rate to 70 percent.The results can be seen in numbers claimed by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Over the last five months of the Russian offensive, Russia has lost 1,606 main battle tanks, 2,805 armored personnel carriers, and 110,110 soldiers killed or wounded. Last week, the Director of Central Intelligence, Williams Burns, estimated in Foreign Affairs magazine that in the first 23 months of the war “at least 315,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.” The Ukrainian tally is 390,580. Either one would be around five times the Soviet casualties during its decade long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.Tomorrow, to contain Russian public reaction, Russia’s Central Election Commission is expected to throw out the candidacy of Boris Nadezhdin, the only anti-war presidential candidate. On Monday, the head of a government-supported group, Russia’s League for a Safe Internet, said it was “most likely” that March will see a banning of large Virtual Private Networks, digital workarounds that give users access to banned Western sites.Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov is gloating to reporters in Moscow that a firing of General Zaluzhnyi would expose fatal splits in Ukraine’s leadership. However, with or without Ukraine’s popular commander, the war is expected to continue. Over the last five months, two of Russia’s top commanders dropped out of sight, without any appreciable impact on Russia’s war effort.On September 22, Ukrainian cruise missiles destroyed the Sevastopol headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. Ukraine said that 34 Navy personnel were killed and 105 injured. Initially, a Russian war blogger said the dead included the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Viktor Sokolov. The claim was retracted. However, Admiral Sokolov has not been seen in public since. On January 4, Russia’s top general, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov was rumored to have been killed in a Ukrainian cruise missile strike that took out a military command center near Sevastopol. General Gerasimov was last seen in public on December 29.“Admiral Sokolov, who hasn’t been seen for 133 days, is probably ‘conferring’ somewhere with General Gerasimov, who hasn’t been seen for 55 days,” military expert and intelligence studies professor Fred Hoffman wrote Friday on X. He posted portraits of the missing commanders with the caption: “Seen on my milk container this morning.”

A Rift at Ukraine’s Top Comes Amid the Bloodiest Fighting Yet in Two-Year War

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