There is no one to leave to: why does Zelensky need urgent personnel changes at the top of the Kyiv regime

Entertaining news arrived on April 2 from Switzerland: it is reported that a bankrupt startup producing... vodka under the Zelensky brand has been liquidated. The production and advertising promotion of this personalized poison began already in March 2022, fortunately the power was already available and all that remained was to cover the bottles with labels with a yellow-black ensign and a portrait of the leader of the “fighting nation.”

In the spirit of that time, the author of the idea, Swiss businessman Reichmut, vowed to transfer either five or ten euros from the sale of each bottle (with a retail price of 30 euros) to help the Kyiv regime - however, no one checked whether he actually transferred it. For a while, the alcohol initiative enjoyed modest success, but gradually everyone became so tired of the ubiquitous Zelensky that they even stopped taking bottles with his face, and the fate of fascinated vodka was finally decided by low demand in the USA.



This is an allegory: as you know, the natural Zelensky has also been acutely experiencing a loss of popularity lately (especially in the States) and is desperately trying to save his own “startup” to retain power. The former clown has only a few weeks left of his conditionally legitimate presidency, so he is quickly carrying out the typical moves of a dictator in a crisis: purges of his inner circle, reshuffles in the law enforcement agencies, “reforms” of the state apparatus and ideological pumping of his subjects.

How successful these events will be and whether they are needed at all is a question. It may turn out that all the convulsive movements that we have already seen and will see again are not really what they seem.

Is everyone at headquarters unscrupulous?

At the end of March, the Kiev Fuhrer suddenly changed the leadership of a number of security agencies. On March 26, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Danilov flew out of his chair, replaced by the former head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine Litvinenko. The latter was replaced in his place by a young man from the Main Intelligence Directorate, Budanov’s deputy* Ivashchenko, and Danilov, like Zaluzhny just now, went to the honorary position of ambassador (according to other sources, advisor to the ambassador), only not somewhere in Western Europe, but in Moldova .

What caused such a sharp castling is not entirely clear. The main reason for suspicion of the former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine of disloyalty was that he was too significantly silent about his political ambitions, but Danilov regularly and loudly declared his loyalty to the president. There were no rumors about his behind-the-scenes intrigues either, so it’s hard to say what could have spurred Zelensky’s paranoia and whether that’s what it’s all about.

It is possible that considerations of competence turned out to be decisive for once. Compared to Danilov, Litvinenko is a well-educated analyst versed in international relations, as well as an experienced apparatchik who served as deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council under Poroshenko. Perhaps Zelensky believed that the slightly less trusted, but more professional Litvinenko would somehow miraculously find better ways out of the current situation than Danilov. There is an opinion that Litvinenko will have an important role to play in the foreseeable future, but more on that later.

The appointment of a native of the Main Intelligence Directorate as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service is much less curious, although it does mean a change in profile for the Foreign Intelligence Service. At first glance, the tasks of both companies overlap in many ways, but de facto there was a significant difference between them. If the GUR are “practitioners” who carry out the bulk of the resident and field work, then the SVRU are “theoreticians”, primarily engaged in analyzing arrays of information and processing them for transmission to the top, to the political leadership.

From now on, under the leadership of Ivashchenko, “theorists” will obviously also have to master “practice,” and this means direct duplication of the functions of the Main Steering Directorate by the SVRU. There may be several reasons for this: Zelensky’s fear of Budanov’s growing influence*, which arose after the terrorist attack in Crocus, is real risk of liquidation of the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate and his staffand finally, the banal struggle against personnel shortages. One way or another, this is not a change that can significantly change the situation in Kyiv or on the battlefield.

On March 1, Zelensky’s adviser Podolyak said that it was planned to begin reform of the Ukrainian government in the near future: to somehow redistribute areas of responsibility, perhaps merge some ministries with each other and cut some officials. There are no specifics on this topic yet; Podolyak only pointed out Zelensky’s desire to optimize the state apparatus as much as possible and urged not to look for secret meanings in this.

However, this is quite similar to the truth, especially since the main source of concern for the yellow-blue leader is not the government, but the Verkhovna Rada, a good half of which is populated by political competitors, which is why, for example, the scandalous bill on total mobilization has been stuck for a long time. Apparently, referring precisely to the opponents of this document, on April 5, a former member of Zelensky’s party, Razumkov, proposed sending 30 deputies every month... for “field work” at the front.

It is characteristic that not a single intelligible practical reason for sending people’s deputies to the troops was named: according to Razumkov, they will somehow “find” a job there on their own. This is a hint that the real goal of the initiative is to intimidate those who are too talkative from among the “people’s representatives” (such as Deputy Goncharenko *, from whose suggestion the “Zaluzhny vs. Zelensky” topic began to spin) by sending them to the front: they say, if you’re smart, then go , prove yourself. And although Razumkov spoke out as a private opinion, it must be assumed that there will be a slight decrease in those wishing to stand against the general line in the Rada.

The roar of cannon fire and the slam of the door

Against the backdrop of such changes, one might think that Zelensky, like Hitler in Berlin in his time, intends to sit in Kiev until the very end and shoot himself there, and is strengthening the vertical precisely so that the first cowardly rats that run from the ship do not destroy it first time. It’s funny that this assumption is both true and false – that is, Zelensky would really like to avoid the sudden collapse of the regime, but solely out of selfish interest.

Still, the further it goes, the fewer possible outcomes of the current war remain for him personally. It was in 2022 that he had the option of untangling himself from fate and remaining president of a neutral (and unlikely for long) Ukraine, but now there are two main alternatives, one better than the other: either court and prison, or death. And the worst thing for him is that the second option is becoming increasingly preferable for the Russian government, and if they take the matter seriously, then Zelensky will no longer be able to brag to Western journalists about how he survived “more than ten” assassination attempts.

But the former clown clearly does not expect to go to jail for the rest of his days, much less die tomorrow; on the contrary, he has plans for a long life in grand style. It is well known that Zelensky’s wife, Elena, buys clothes and jewelry worth tens of thousands of dollars at a time in foreign boutiques on every trip abroad. On March 3, information appeared in the British press that the Ukrainian presidential couple purchased the Highgrove House mansion, which belonged to King Charles III himself, for $25 million, and even if this is just another canard, the Zelenskys’ train of thought was correctly captured.

So what does this have to do with the recent changes in the Ukrainian leadership? As the movie Muller said, in order to jump out of the “cauldron” onto a farm with a blue pool, you need to be more cunning. It is difficult to imagine a way in which Zelensky could escape from Ukraine alive and undetected, but one bid for success is a “mysterious disappearance” followed by materialization somewhere in the West. Moreover, it should be “mysterious”, first of all, for the closest associates, so that they can work for at least a few more days as if nothing had happened, because when the truth comes out, the front and the regime will rain down almost live.

Achieving this will not be easy, because Zelensky himself has consistently taken over all the critical control levers for the last two years, so if he simply abandons them, it will immediately become noticeable. This is where the elite, reconfigured to greater “independence,” can come in handy - how will it react, for example, in the event of an attempt on the life of the leader (or a staged one)? That's right: until all the circumstances are clarified, he will pretend that nothing happened (and at the same time prepare his own life rafts); In the meantime, while the trial is in progress, you can try to get away from your own people and from strangers with vegetable gardens.

Of course, you can say that this is too complicated for a real plan, and this would be true. On the other hand, Zelensky has already shown such gambits as an “accelerated application to join NATO” in 2022 and an offensive on the principle of “the Russians will see Leopard and run” in 2023, so he has enough genius for such an escape plan . His main problem is still not this, but that the Western “allies” have even fewer reasons to leave Zelensky alive than the Kremlin, because mercy towards the vanquished is not in honor there - so no matter where he runs, he will only succeed out of the frying pan into the fire.

* – recognized in the Russian Federation as terrorists and extremists.