Over at The Spectator, Owen Matthews has a sobering dispatch about this week’s big news in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked his popular defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, leading to protests. Matthews reports that Zelensky is increasingly dependent on ultranationalist support from within the military and the defense-tech industry. And he’s willing to buck even his international supporters — Poland and the United States among them — in order to keep this crew onside. Zelensky has also fired his chief of the general staff, Oleksandr Syrskyi.
Matthews includes some eye-popping characterizations of the current Ukrainian government, which has layers to serve different constituencies — foreign supporters of the war, ultranationalists, and Zelensky’s insiders.
The most important question is how the sacking of both Fedorov and now Syrskyi will impact the outcome of the war. The narrative that Ukraine is now winning thanks to its long-range strikes is, in part, a carefully constructed PR story put together for the Nato summit in Ankara where crucial funding packages were decided. That’s not to say that Ukrainian deep strikes aren’t doing real damage. Dozens of Russian oil refineries have been set ablaze and last week two giant warehouses belonging to Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon, were destroyed. Equally real are the massive gasoline lines in almost every Russian province, the effective blockade of the Crimean peninsula and the sunken tankers in the sea of Azov that tried to break it.
But the narrative of Ukrainian victory leaves out half the scorecard. On the ground, Russian troops have reached the centre of Konstantinovka, one of the three remaining ‘fortress cities’ of the Donbas. Reports suggest that Kyiv’s strikes have damaged, not destroyed Russia’s refineries – capacity has gone down by only 13.5 per cent. That’s undoubtedly painful for the Kremlin, but by no means catastrophic. And in recent weeks a chronic shortage of US-made Patriot interceptors has left Kyiv and other cities wide open to attack by Russian ballistic missiles, which have destroyed an underground metro station and are systematically taking out hundreds of petrol stations. At the Nato summit, the US offered Ukraine (and France) a licence to produce their own Patriots – but that won’t become a reality for at least two years. As Ukraine’s military chief Syrskyi said, the long-range strikes are ‘reciprocal’, with Ukraine being hit every bit as hard as it is able to hit back.
Matthews clearly believes that Fedorov was a man for the future, someone who had helped Ukraine adapt and evolve the battlefield conditions to sustain its incredible resistance to Russia’s war of attrition.