Berlin Volodimir Zelensky is considered a communicator. The Ukrainian President and the US secret services are predicting heavy attacks from Russia on Wednesday. The date is symbolically charged twice, because Ukraine is celebrating its 31st Independence Day – and Putin’s campaign against the country began exactly six months ago.
All major events and public meetings were initially prohibited until Thursday. The President warned the population to get to safety immediately if the siren sounded and not to leave the house. He expects “Russia to do something particularly cruel and repulsive on Ukrainian Independence Day,” said the head of state on Monday in his evening speech, which he has given daily since the outbreak of war and also streamed via social networks.
Anyone who sees him recognizes a visibly aged man. Selenski no longer radiates the youthful lightness of the 44-year-old TV entertainer with which he took office in May 2019. After the war broke out, he grew a beard and wore only military green T-shirts and jackets. The comedian (comedy series “Servants of the People”) became a warlord.
His statement “I need guns and no rides”, with which he refused to flee abroad to the USA, earned him respect and a following. So far, Selenski has been able to freely switch and rule with his team, which is partly made up of colleagues from his television production company Kwartal 95 in the presidential administration and government.
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But the grace period seems to have expired. And of all things, his image as a communicator is suddenly in question. The well-known screenwriter and playwright Kateryna Babkina has now accused Selenski of having ignored the war warnings of the US secret services more than six months ago and of not having prepared his people for the armed conflict: “It is not an accident, it is not a mistake, not an unfortunate misunderstanding, not a strategic miscalculation – it is a crime,” Babkina stressed.
Selenski fired his attorney general – and with it a close confidante.
(Photo: dpa)
Sevgil Musayeva, editor-in-chief of the traditionally anti-government “Ukrainska Pravda”, also accused the head of state of disinformation. By concealing the drama of the situation at the beginning of the year, he “raised doubts about the mental capacity of millions of Ukrainians”.
Due to a lack of preparations for war, Selenski is partly responsible for “concrete human losses”. Sooner or later, these questions “will have to be answered honestly,” Musaeva said.
In an interview with the Washington Post at the end of last week, Zelensky openly admitted for the first time that the USA had given very specific warnings of a Russian attack and that he had advised the population not to panic.
Concealed for tactical reasons
Zelenskiy justified his behavior with these words: “If we had reported it – which some people whose names I will not name wanted – I would have lost $7 billion a month since October last year.” Then he added: “And in that The moment the Russians attacked, they would have taken us in three days.”
If he had made the US warnings public and hadn’t spread the alleged findings of his secret services to the contrary, the consequences would have been devastating, Zelenski argued: Investors would have left, factories would have been relocated and millions of people would have fled at the end of last year. His conclusion: the ability to defend would have been massively endangered.
The opposition MP Iryna Geraschenko does not accept this: Zelensky simply failed to prepare the country for aggression by its big neighbor. The secret service SBU had ex-president Petro “hunted Poroshenko and the opposition instead of sorting out the collaborators”.
On March 17, the Ukrainian President addressed the German parliament via video link.
(Photo: IMAGO/Future Image)
It was precisely this accusation that was the undoing of Ivan Bakanov in mid-July. Zelenskiy dismissed his childhood friend, who had been head of the Ukrainian secret service SBU until then. Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova also had to leave. Both have done too little against pro-Russian collaborators. This revealed the first cracks in Selenski’s hand-picked team, which consists mainly of long-time confidants from his time as an actor, comedian and TV producer.
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However, the former television star and his companions have also changed their behavior: before the outbreak of war, Zelenskiy, together with the head of his presidential administration, the former cinema producer Andri Jermak, “constantly practiced micromanagement and tried to personally interfere in all the details of various state processes”, report insiders.
Now the President is fully focused on military and diplomatic issues, while economic issues are now left to the government. Several leading experts and politicians, who do not want to be quoted by name, say independently of one another that this suggests that there could be a serious political crisis in the winter.
It is expected that the Russian army will destroy all power plants and district heating pipes before winter sets in so that the Ukrainian population freezes and flees – and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal falls. He would thus be portrayed as the culprit for what is expected to be the worst heating crisis in the history of Ukraine in order to take Zelensky out of the political field of fire.
Oleksandr Danylyuk, coordinator of the civil rights movement “Common Cause”, is already calling for an “end to the political bickering that has now broken out again”. This only benefits the enemy Russia, he said. Danylyuk referred to recent military successes. In fact, individual villages in the south were recaptured, and the Russian military suffered severe blows on the annexed Crimean Peninsula.
More: The last critical journalists under Putin – “When I was driving, I looked to see if I was being followed”