Zelensky begins mass dismissal of cabinet ministers - World Socialist Web Site

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/06/qwdk-s06.html

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky began the largest shake-up of the country’s cabinet since the beginning of the war. So far, seven ministers have resigned and one presidential aide was fired.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is thus far the most prominent of Zelensky’s ministers to offer his resignation in a mass exodus that is expected to continue in the coming days.

Other exiting staff include Justice Minister Denys Maliuska, Ecology Minister Ruslan Strilets, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Olha Stefanishyna, and Deputy Prime Minister Reintegration Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, and Strategic Industries Minister Alexander Kamyshin, who was in charge of weapons production.

According to the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in parliament, David Arakhamia, the changes could end up involving more than half of Zelensky’s staff. It is the largest government shake-up since 2020, when Zelensky dismissed much of his early government in favor of ministers closely tied to Western imperialism and the former administration of President Petro Poroshenko.

On Thursday, Ukraine’s parliament voted to accept Kuleba’s resignation. He will be replaced by Andrii Sybiha, who previously served as deputy foreign minister. Kuleba, who began his political career under Poroshenko, has served as Ukraine’s Foreign Minister since March 2020 following the dismissal of then Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk and his entire cabinet. During his brief six-month tenure as prime minister, Honcharuk was best known for attending a neo-Nazi rock concert in Kiev.

Kuleba was involved in the elaboration of a new national security strategy to “recover” Crimea in early 2021, which is widely seen as a major factor in provoking the Russian invasion a year later. Since 2022, he has continually prodded the Western imperialist powers to remove any limitations on Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons inside of Russia. He developed particularly close ties with the Biden administration and played a leading role in finalizing the ten-year bilateral security agreement between the United States and Ukraine in June.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in September 2023.

On Tuesday, just one day before his resignation, Kuleba gave an interview to CNN, calling upon Ukraine’s NATO backers to send more long-range weapons and lift restrictions on striking airfields deep inside Russia, as well as permit the use of NATO air defense systems to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukrainian territory. Dismissing any concerns over the escalation of war with a nuclear-armed Russia, Kuleba stated, “What else has to happen for everyone in the world to understand that the escalation argument is flawed? It never worked in the last two and a half years.” He added that fear of escalation “simply serves as an excuse not to do something.”

Zelensky, who is ruling the country without a legal mandate after suspending presidential elections, has yet to offer any details on the reasons for the mass resignation of his ministers. He only stated on Wednesday that Ukraine needs “new energy, and that includes in diplomacy.” His own party appears to be divided about the government shake-up. According to Russia’s Gazeta.ru, Zelensky had to overcome opposition within his own Servant of the People party to complete the sweeping changes especially in regards to Kuleba’s dismissal and was looking to trade votes for “personal, financial or other bonuses.” Because of the opposition in the ruling party, Zelensky has still not been able to dismiss as many ministers and officials as he wants to.

The shake-up is an indication of the intense military, political and economic crisis gripping the country.

In East Ukraine, the Ukrainian army is faced with the prospect of collapse. Russia moved only a limited number of troops to counter the Kursk invasion and nearly a month later, Russian forces are now reportedly advancing at a daily rate of 500 meters to one kilometer on several axes in the Donetsk region near the strategically important city of Pokrovsk, which serves as a road and rail hub for the Ukrainian army.

Just 26,000 residents remain in the city formerly of over 40,000 as Russian forces are now reportedly just 10 km east of the city. Its capture is regarded as imminent by military analysts and the Ukrainian government, which ordered its evacuation earlier in August. With further advances into Donetsk, Russia will likely be able to strike Ukrainian forces throughout the neighboring Zaporizhia region.

Meanwhile, after over two years of war and half a million dead, opposition to the war in the population and among the soldiers is growing. Almost every day, new videos circulate showing Ukrainians confronting military recruiters to prevent them from kidnapping men off the street even in the country’s western regions where nationalism has historically had the most support.

At the front lines, three companies of a battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, including their commanders, refused to execute the orders of the military high command because of a “huge personnel shortage,” according to Strana.ua. Ukrainian troops are outnumbered by Russian troops by a ratio of one to three. Ukrainian soldiers are reportedly also deserting in large numbers, in what are growing indications of the unfolding disintegration of the Ukrainian armed forces.

In addition to successive military setbacks in East Ukraine, the country is facing a severe energy crisis caused by the war. One of the principal components of Russia’s military strategy has consisted of targeted attacks on energy infrastructure, which have led to rolling blackouts throughout the country and contributed to masses of Ukrainians fleeing the country or refusing to return from abroad. It is widely feared that the country will be unable to provide enough energy for heat and electricity this winter, and it was the energy minister who was first forced to leave earlier this week.

There are also indications that the government crisis and conflicts in the ruling class are propelled by the US presidential elections. As the Financial Times reported, “Uncertainty surrounding the upcoming US presidential election and internal pressures in the EU are also of concern to Kyiv, which fears the long-term security and financial commitments it relies on could soon wane.” In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman on Tuesday, Donald Trump reiterated his promise of ending the war declaring, “If I win, as president-elect, I’ll have a deal made, guaranteed. That’s a war that shouldn’t have happened.” For many years, the war against Russia in Ukraine has been central to the factional infighting between the Democratic Party and the Republicans. In 2019, the Democrats made the arming of Ukraine for war against Russia a central issue in their effort to impeach Donald Trump.

Given the intense political crisis in the US, one aspect of the frenzied government reshuffle in Kiev may well be an effort by Zelensky to create as many “facts on the ground” as possible before a potential shift in power in the White House. Zelensky is expected to attend the United Nations’ General Assembly and meet with outgoing US President Joe Biden later this month. Several reports in Western media speculated that he hoped to have a new cabinet to present to his NATO backers, who have no doubt been consulted beforehand. Last week, Zelensky also announced that he planned to present Biden with a four-part “victory plan” but declined to give any details.

In an interview with NBC on Tuesday, Zelensky claimed that his adventurist invasion of the Kursk region is part of his “victory plan” and that Ukraine plans to hold onto the reported 1,000 square kilometers of occupied Russian territory indefinitely.

Ukraine continues offensive inside Russia18 August 2024
Resistance to war grows among soldiers and civilians in Ukraine11 August 2024
Underground journalists speak on war fatigue and the slide to dictatorship in Ukraine21 July 2024

Comment

The Ukrainian military’s offensive into two Russian border regions, Kursk and Belgorod, is entering its second week. Kiev claims to have captured 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), including at least 74 settlements and hundreds of prisoners of war. The troops carrying out the first invasion of Russia since the end of World War II were trained in the UK, and are using American and German battle tanks as well as American-supplied HIMARS rockets.

A destroyed Russian tank lies on a roadside near Sudzha, Kursk region, Russia, Friday, Aug. 16, 2024.

So far, Ukraine has blown up two bridges in the region and has interdicted a key rail line that the Russian army used to deliver supplies and troops to the front in Ukraine.

The destruction of the bridges has also disrupted ongoing efforts to evacuate residents from the combat zones in both Kursk and Belgorod. Over 180,000 people have already been evacuated, and the continuing evacuations indicate that the Kremlin is not anticipating a quick end to the fighting.

Nevertheless, according to Russian news reports, a significant number of civilians still remain in areas now occupied by Ukrainian forces. The Russian paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta cited Russian pro-Kremlin war journalist Aleksandr Kharchenko as saying, “A large number of our citizens are under the control of the Ukrainian forces.”

On Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that the goal of the incursion was to create “a buffer zone.” He stated, “it is now our primary task in defensive operations overall: to destroy as much Russian war potential as possible and conduct maximum counteroffensive actions.”

Russian authorities also claim that Kiev is preparing an attack on the nuclear power plants in the Russian region of Kursk and Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine, currently controlled by Russian forces. Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, is ongoing.

Underscoring both the involvement of the US in the operation and its predatory character, retired general David Petraeus, one of the greatest war criminals of the US invasion of Iraq, and later head of the CIA, praised the Ukrainian invasion on the BBC Global News Podcast. “This is not unlike when we did the invasion of Iraq, a great armored brigade did the thunder run through Baghdad and ends up on the airfield and they said, ‘Hey, let’s just gonna stay here’. Let’s develop the situation, let’s see what happens from here, how does the enemy respond. I think that’s where they are.”

Whatever the immediate military and political calculations behind the incursion, its underlying strategy and goals reveal the imperialist character of the war waged by the imperialist powers against Russia. NATO deliberately provoked the invasion by the Putin regime in order to use Ukraine as a staging ground for a much broader war whose ultimate goal is the carve-up of the entire region.

No one has been more open about these goals than Ukraine’s military leadership. Both the ex-head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have repeatedly been photographed with a map of a carved-up Russia, divided up between different powers. Based on this map, a substantial portion of what is now southeastern Russia, including the Kursk, Belgorod and Rostov regions, would fall to Ukraine in a modern-day version of the long-standing aim of the fascists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to establish a “Greater Ukraine”.

A map of a carved-up Russia. Both the former head of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kirill Budanov, have been photographed with this map in their offices since 2022.

This strategy includes not only military offensives into Russian territory but also terrorist attacks within Russia, such as the March Moscow Crocus City Hall attack, which killed over 140 people, and political assassinations. From the standpoint of the imperialist powers, the ultimate aim is to weaken the Putin regime militarily and politically, in order to create conditions for its overthrow by NATO-backed sections of the Russian oligarchy and state apparatus as part of an effort to bring the entire region under their direct control.

The Putin administration, which has emerged as a Bonapartist regime out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism, is, by its very class and political nature, extremely vulnerable to such pressures. As the WSWS has explained, its principal function consists of safeguarding the vast social privileges of the oligarchy. It has sought to do so by balancing, first, between different sections of the oligarchy, second, between the oligarchy and imperialism, and third, between the oligarchy and the working class. But the entire strategy of imperialism and its proxy in Ukraine, which consists of both ever more aggressive military offensives and systematic efforts to fuel tensions within the oligarchy, is undermining the Kremlin’s policies.

So far, the Putin regime’s response to the first imperialist-backed invasion of the country since the defeat of the Nazis by the Red Army in World War II has been markedly muted, itself one of many indicators that conflicts are indeed raging behind the scenes. The incursion came shortly after the Putin regime initiated a major purge of its army leadership. Moreover, just days before the incursion, the Kremlin had negotiated a prisoner swap with Washington, in which it released several of the most prominent representatives of the NATO-backed opposition, most notably Vladimir Kara-Murza and several members of the team of the late Alexei Navalny, long the central stooge of imperialism in the oligarchy.

A lengthy interview aired by Russia’s leading state TV channel, “Rossiia,” with the president of Belarus and one of the principal allies of Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, on Saturday, provided some insight into the considerations and heated discussions within the oligarchy. Lukashenko reiterated Putin’s warnings that NATO was preparing a direct entry into the war which would mean “World War III”. He stated that with the invasion of Kursk, Ukraine was trying to provoke Russia into a general mobilization to “destabilize society from within, we are not prepared to do this, we don’t want this.” Lukashenko also claimed that Ukraine had amassed 120,000 troops on its border with Belarus and that Minsk had responded by mobilizing a third of its military—some 65,000 men—to the already heavily mined border. He then spoke at length about Belarus’s preparations for a potential war with NATO member Poland and threatened that Ukraine’s Kursk invasion could end in its own “destruction.”

He insisted repeatedly, “We don’t want escalation. We don’t want this war against all of NATO. We don’t want it. But if they go for it, then we won’t have a choice.” Lukashenko then discussed the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia on Belarusian territory. When asked whether he was prepared to “press the red button,” he emphatically declared that he was, as soon as the borders of Belarus were violated. “If you don’t want this, then let’s sit down at the negotiating table and let’s end this little fight [i.e., the war in Ukraine].” He went on to claim that there are “no Nazis” in Ukraine anymore and that the Kremlin’s supposed goal of the “de-Nazification of Ukraine” had been effectively accomplished.

Of course, the Putin regime, which is itself steeped in Great Russian chauvinism and maintains extensive ties to the far-right, never wanted, nor could it undertake, a serious struggle against fascism. Nevertheless, these statements by Lukashenko, made on Russian state television as Ukrainian troops on Russian soil are using Nazi insignia on their uniforms, suggest that significant sections of the state and oligarchy are responding to the invasion by intensifying discussions on how to reach a negotiated settlement with imperialism as fast as possible.

At the same time, other sections in the oligarchy warn that the country must prepare for a protracted war and a potential second mobilization. One characteristic comment on the right-wing pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad.Ru evoked the memory of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which claimed the lives of 27 million Soviet citizens, and warned that “Victory will require a protracted war.”

The imperialist-backed incursion of Russia, the first such invasion since 1941, and the political disarray it has provoked within the oligarchy underscore above all the catastrophic outcome of the Stalinist betrayal of the 1917 October revolution, which culminated in the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. Whatever its bitter and violent infighting, the Russian oligarchy that emerged out of this counter-revolution is infinitely more concerned with preempting a movement within the working class than with the danger posed by imperialism.

The imminent threat of an imperialist carve-up of the region and nuclear war can only be countered, on a progressive basis, through the intervention of the working class, which must conduct its struggle independently from all sections of the oligarchy and the imperialist powers, based on the socialist and internationalist traditions that inspired the October Revolution.

Comment

Zelensky begins mass dismissal of cabinet ministers - World Socialist Web Site

Read more

Read more