Ukraine’s most formidable commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, refused President Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s offer to replace General Valery Zaluzhny from the post of Chief of the General Staff in Kyiv, Reuters and The Times write.

A source familiar with the talks told Reuters on Wednesday that Zelenskyi had offered the job to Syrskyi, who is now the commander of the Ukrainian Army’s Ground Forces, but that he did not want to replace Zaluzhnyi, whom many Ukrainians, both civilians and military, have. , I see him as a hero.

It was Syrsky who led the defense of Kyiv in the early days of the war and led the offensive that led to the catastrophic collapse of the Russian front in the Kharkiv region in September 2022 in one of the Ukrainian military’s loudest battlefield victories.

The Reuters source did not specify when exactly Zelensky offered Sirsky the position of head of the Administration, but sources of the British newspaper The London Times independently confirmed the information.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian mass media reported, citing their own sources familiar with the discussions in Zelenskyi’s office, that the Ukrainian president had decided to replace Zaluzhny. Some Ukrainian mass media even reported that he had already been released by decree, but this information did not come true.

The Times reported on Wednesday that Zelensky reversed the decision to replace his general after Syrsky and General Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian army’s head of military intelligence, refused to take his place.

In turn, the Kyiv press called them two favorites to replace Zaluzhny.

The first disagreements between Zelenskyi and the chief of the Ukrainian General Staff would have arisen even before the failure of the summer offensive

The first signs of tension between Zelensky and Zaluzhny appeared in the spring of this year, when the chief of the General Staff wanted to withdraw troops from Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that the Russians tried to capture last November, due to losses. Ukrainian defenders were injured.

But Zelensky categorically opposed the withdrawal, believing that the loss of Bakhmut would open the way for Russian troops to attack other key Ukrainian cities.

However, the differences between them flared up publicly only late last year, after Zaluzhny hinted in an interview with The Economist in early November that Kyiv’s summer offensive had failed.

President Zelenskyi’s office immediately criticized the comments, and the Ukrainian president later said the offensive had not “deadlocked,” as the general claimed. But time will show that Zaluzhny was right.

At the beginning of December, the Ukrainian press wrote that Zelensky avoided his most important general in discussing the situation at the front, preferring to communicate directly with the command of various branches of the armed forces or through various intermediaries. .

Zelensky’s Cabinet consistently denies information about tensions between the president and the head of the Administration.

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