Zelenskyy ousts Ukraine army chief after protests - The Latest
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This is The Guardian.
Really, within hours of the decision, there were people gathering outside Zelensky's presidential office, shouting Searsky out. The critique of Zelensky is that he can be centralizing, he makes impulsive and chaotic personnel decisions. What I think is remarkable is that Zelensky, after five days of protests, has essentially bowed to their demands and he's got rid of Searsky.
From The Guardian's Today In Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Hough. Yesterday, the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, fired his commander-in-chief of the army, Oleksandr Sersky, in what seems to be the biggest military shake-up in years of this conflict in Ukraine. Luke Harding, you're our senior international correspondent. What's going on? Why has Zelensky made this decision?
I think this decision to fire the commander-in-chief, Colonel General Alexander Siersky, is really a victory for reformists, for modernizers, for society, civil society in Ukraine, which had demanded that Siersky was removed. And I think it's a really interesting step. I mean, it shows above all that Ukraine is a democracy where there is a president in the shape of Zelensky who makes mistakes, but who also is acutely aware of popular opinion in the middle of a war and tries to fix them.
And so who is Sersky and why was he such a controversial figure?
I mean, Sersky is a controversial figure for a number of reasons. I think primarily because he's seen as very much an old school general. He's Soviet trained, 60 years old. On the one hand, he's played a huge role in this war. He was the person who organised the defence of Kiev in the spring of 2022 when Russia Russian tanks were rolling imperiously towards the capital from Belarus and the Ukrainian armed forces kind of held them off and drove them back. And he's also the person who launched a surprise counteroffensive into Russia, into the Western Kursk region of Russia in the summer of 2024, where... Ukrainian soldiers were actually steaming on on fighting vehicles through Russian villages. It was another astonishing moment.
So so he is someone with a record. But the problem, I think, is that he's regarded by many people as inflexible, centralizing a micromanager. And also, you know, the gravest accusation is that he is. use kind of Russian-style meat assaults, as they're known, where he's thrown Ukrainian troops into battle and the losses have been very high.
OK, so Sersky has now gone, but this follows a week of protests after the dismissal of the former defence minister. You were at some of those protests. What were people telling you about their concerns about that decision?
Yeah, I mean, that's right, Lucy. Last week, Zelensky unexpectedly fired Mikhail Fedorov, a 35-year-old, young, digitally savvy, popular man defence minister and sided with Sierski, the two had fallen out catastrophically over how to prosecute the war and the role of drones and so on. And really, within hours of the decision, there were people gathering outside Zelensky's presidential office, waving cardboard banners and shouting Sierski out, Sierski out. And I went to those protests, I reported from the square, and the mood was electric. And what was really interesting was the sense that these people, mostly young people, some older, but essentially it was the kind of young post-Soviet generation, understood profoundly that they were the power, that actually it wasn't the government, it wasn't Zelensky and his team, it was the people on the street who ultimately held all the cards.
And What I think is remarkable is that Zelensky, after five days of protests, not just in Kiev, but across the capital, has essentially bowed to their demands and he's got rid of Zelensky.
So how do these two things interlink? Because Fedorov is now reportedly, according to Zelensky, being brought back into the government in a senior position. So is that trying to placate some of that public anger? And do we know what he'll be doing in terms of the war efforts?
Why did Zelensky fire Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Sersky?
That's the big mystery, is what happens to Fedorov now, because his old job, defence minister, has been taken by someone else.
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