One month away from the first year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has begun a purge of officials accused of corruption or mismanagement. Members of ministries and at least five regional governors were dismissed or left their positions.
The veneer of what presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak called the boss’s harmony with society’s desires seems to have been tailored to assuage constant criticism among Western governments about the degree of government corruption, muffled in this year of war by the need to unite against the Russians.
The change comes just as NATO (the Western military alliance) is intensely debating the pros and cons of escalating its military aid to Kiev by sending German war tanks into the conflict.
In addition, Russia has had its first victories in months, in offensives in the east and south of the country, putting pressure on the top of the government, and the Ukrainian energy infrastructure feels the weight of constant attacks from Moscow: this Tuesday (24) , Lviv (west) was left in the dark due to lack of conditions to meet electricity consumption.
On the other hand, by the same freezing of internal political tensions in Ukraine due to the invasion, Zelensky may be promoting the purge to align forces around himself. The impact of Vladimir Putin’s war often overshadows the fact that the president was unpopular and weakened by factional strife in his own government.
“Zelensky’s personnel decisions bear witness to the state’s key priorities. The president sees and listens to society, and responds directly to a central public demand: justice for all,” Podoliak said on Monday (23).
The speech settles like music in Brussels and Washington, but it suggests that Zelensky’s position is more shaky than his persona as commander of the Ukrainian resistance suggests. The picture should become clearer in the coming days.
The most striking head so far is that of Kirilo Timochenko, an ally of the president’s 2019 election campaign who was Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff. Throughout the war, he was criticized by local media for allowing himself to be photographed driving sports cars.
There were two more serious casualties on corruption charges: Deputy Defense Minister Viacheslav Chapovalov was accused of inflating troop food prices, and Deputy Minister of Regions Vasil Lozinski admitted to receiving $400,000. 2.1 million) in bribes.
The deputy attorney general, Oleskii Simonenko, who recently took a vacation in Spain with his family, and deputy ministers of Development, Community, Economy and Social Policy, all for mismanagement and suspicions of corruption, also fell.
Significantly, the governors of Kiev, Dnipopetrovsk, Sumi, Kherson and Zaporizia (the last two illegally annexed by Putin) were removed, which may occur within the state of emergency in which the country has been since the invasion. It has not yet been disclosed what weighed against them.
More changes are foreseen, according to observers of the Ukrainian political scene. The purge is the first of its kind since the war began – before that, there were occasional resignations of officials identified with Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population, concentrated in the east of the country.
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