View from Washington: Replacing Zelensky – does it matter when security issues in Europe need to be on the table?

Get out, sir!

One of the reasons the West wants to dump Zelensky is his unwillingness to negotiate with, writes Stephen Bryen, a former US Deputy Under Secretary of Defense. Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR) says that the West is planning to replace Zelensky and will soon embark on a campaign to discredit him.

The Russians have been making the point for some time that Zelensky is not a legitimate leader of Ukraine as his electoral mandate expired last May and Zelensky refused to hold elections. 

The fact that Ukrainians are willing to show that they do not support Zelensky is fairly remarkable in a state where normal freedoms are restricted and where the press is tightly controlled.

The other problem bedeviling Zelensky is the state of the Ukrainian army and the resistance to recruiting new soldiers  Despite the incursion in Kursk, Ukraine has been steadily losing ground on the battlefield and suffering high casualties.  It isn't clear how much longer that can go on, but it is possible that analysts in the US and Europe are starting to grasp the need to end the war before the Ukrainian edifice crumbles.

There has been a lot of swirl over the summer as various Zelensky replacements have begun to garner attention.  Most of them are old hands who have served before, and none of them necessarily have a demonstrable popular following.  Among them are the mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, former President Petro Poroshenko, and former Ukrainian President Yulia Tymoshenko.

It is clear that Zelensky is starting to gamble given the deteriorating conditions in the country.  That gambling is clearly evident in the Kursk invasion, but it also is manifest in attacks on sensitive installations inside Russia and elsewhere, including the drone attack in mid-August on the Zaphorize nuclear power plant (and the threat to the Kursk nuclear power plant). These sorts of attacks threaten Russia and Ukraine, but also Europe if a massive nuclear incident occurs, just as Europe was threatened when a reactor at Ukrainian Chernobyl went critical in 1986 and caught fire

Most NATO partners are now saying that Russia needs to be included in forthcoming peace negotiations, but there is no agreement on the format of such negotiations or the line up of participants. Even Zelensky is saying so. Meanwhile the Russians are saying they are not interested. As there are no offers on the table that would draw Russia into a serious discussion, it remains to be seen if one can emerge in the near future.

The issues between Ukraine and Russia go beyond Ukraine and involve NATO, its presence in Ukraine, and the overall security framework in Europe. The truth is no one in the west is talking about the NATO part of the equation, so replacing Zelensky won't make any real difference until the top security issues between NATO and Russia are addressed.

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