Valerii Zaluzhnyi

It's

actually very difficult because If you have a change of personnel between Zelensky and Zaluzhny, that's no good.

The Russians don't want that kind of elections.

That means you have to have free elections.

My feeling is, my sense, my intuition tells me that Zelensky's days are numbered.

that he will be overthrown by his own people.

People like Fyodorov or Poroshenko or Zaluzhny.

I mean, they're just sitting there and this is why there are all these scandals.

But on other matters, NATO membership.

Look, the former Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief, General Zaluzhny, who's now the Ambassador to London, he came out a couple of weeks ago and said, we're never going to get into NATO.

They'll never let us in.

They'll never fight for us.

One of the main stories I heard, uh, when I was there was about this brewing conflict between the, really the top civilian and military officials.

And, you know, this sort of manifested most notably in the article written by General Zaluzhnyi, who's the head of the armed forces, in The Economist, where he, you know, basically acknowledged that the war was drifting into, uh, a stalemate of sorts, positional warfare, uh, that the counteroffensive didn't achieve, you know, the breakthrough that had been hoped for.

And this was, you know, published after months and months of public statements by President Zelensky and Zelensky's advisors that, you know, there was still hope for a breakthrough and Ukrainian armed forces was making progress on the battlefield.

So it really cut against that sort of official narrative, and the reaction from Zelensky's office was, you know, pretty sharply, uh, critical of, you know, the timing and the presentation by, by General Zaluzhnyi.

It wasn't just about that article.

I mean, there had been kind of personality and bureaucratic conflicts brewing for really since the beginning of the war, and kind of the, the underwhelming, uh, results of the, the counteroffensive have really brought those to the fore.

So Ukrainians I talked to are worried about a broader, you know, breach in, in the leadership, um, seeing both, you know, President Zelensky and General Zaluzhnyi as having, you know, made significant contributions to, um, to the war effort and seeing them both-

And it, you know, Zaluzhnyi, just for listeners who, for whom that name is not as prominent as Zelensky's, uh, Zaluzhnyi is a very revered figure in Ukraine as somebody who, sort of on the military side, has really run the war.

None.

Budanov and Zaluzhnyi should not be allowed to think that they are going to be the future of Ukraine.

They will not be.

They are the problem, not the solution.

No, it's not.

It's become what Zaluzhny calls a protracted confrontation of attrition.

Frontline advances stop being the main indicator of success.

The real fight is about industrial capacity, economic endurance, who can keep producing drones and missiles and shells longer.

The German government's reaction to the discovery of the Joan in Leipzig stands in stark contrast to its response to the largest terrorist attack on infrastructure in recent memory, the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline in 2022.

Although the Ukrainian perpetrators have since been identified, and the trail leads to the then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzny, the German government has never protested, let alone imposed, punitive measures on Kiev.

Its stance on terrorist attacks, whether real or fictitious, is determined not by facts, but by its imperialist interests.

The latest provocation against Russia cannot be understood in isolation from the global situation.

End quote.

The public statement that came closest to addressing the issue was by Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Quote, President Trump is abusing his powers as commander-in-chief and eroding the military's proper role in American democracy, said Reed, posing the question whether American forces will now be used to secure oil assets in which the Pentagon now holds a financial interest.

His proposal, however, was toothless.