bad week on the home front for Volodymyr Zelensky

Just as reports from the front lines in Ukraine are giving Volodymyr Zelensky some reasons to be cheerful, his government has descended into turmoil. Within a matter of days he sacked his defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, before having to fire his commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi.

Fedorov’s dismissal was very much Zelensky’s decision. Syrskyi’s, however, appears to have been forced on the Ukrainian president, after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Ukraine to protest the departure of the defence minister. Fedorov is widely credited with masterminding the success of Ukraine’s drone strategy, which, apart from helping to even up the odds on the front lines, has wreaked havoc inside Russia and Crimea.

Using drones to target Russian energy infrastructure has led to petrol shortages, and power outages across the country. Crimea, meanwhile, is under a state of emergency thanks to a bombing campaign targeting bridges, rail lines, roads and other infrastructure.

So it’s unsurprising that so many people are angry at Zelensky’s decision to dismiss Fedorov, writes Stefan Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham. It seemed to make very little sense to defenestrate someone whose modern approach and nimble thinking have enabled this success.

Zelensky’s choice of replacements will, however, go some way to placating the protesters, Wolff believes. The military commander brought in to replace Syrskyi, Mykhailo Drapatyi, is thought of as part of a new generation of strategists very much aligned with Fedorov’s hi-tech approach. The acting defence minister, Yevhenii Khmara, is on the same page. This will be critical if Ukraine is to maintain its momentum.

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The crisis began when Fedorov called for Syrskyi’s removal, saying the commander was blocking his attempts to reform Ukraine’s defence establishment. In the event, it was Fedorov that Zelensky sacked. The president opted to back his most senior military officer rather than his political colleague.

This is par for the course for Ukraine, say Sarah Whitmore of Oxford Brookes University and Bettina Renz of Nottingham University. The pair have spent some years researching the relationship between the government and the military in Ukraine. They have traced this pattern back to well before Zelensky acceded to the presidency in 2019.

Which is remarkable when you think that Nato and the EU, which have been encouraging reform in Ukraine as a condition for joining those alliances, require civilian control of the military. It hasn’t helped that previous defence ministers have been caught up in corruption scandals (three former defence ministers are accused of treason for allegedly selling off vital defence supplies). But Zelensky has also shown he is also more likely to side with his military commanders, write Whitmore and Renz. And this is unlikely to change while Ukraine remains under existential threat from Russia.

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Putin under pressure

Someone else under existential threat, if you believe some of the more breathless commentary on the state of Russian politics during the war, is Vladimir Putin himself. Certainly Ukraine’s recent successes and the hardships they are imposing on the Russian people, coupled with the terrible death toll among Russian troops and the prospect of further rounds of conscription, have affected the Russian president’s popularity.

Putin’s approval ratings have fallen steadily this year and the Kremlin has been forced to deal harshly with a couple of outspoken Putin critics. But whether this is a sign that the president is losing his grip on power in Russia is debatable, to say the least. Since taking office on the last day of 1999, Putin has assumed almost complete control of the levers of power in Russia.

Opponents have been ruthlessly liquidated, the media stifled and big business – once a potentially powerful source of opposition to Putin – largely tamed.

Besides which, as Bo Petersson of Malmo University points out, history tells us that Russian (and Soviet) leaders tend to die in office. Petersson suggests this is likely to be Putin’s destiny too.

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Flies on the White House wall

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading a fascinating new book about the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is a detailed, almost fly-on-the-wall report of goings on in the White House. It’s irresistible stuff for what our reviewer Colleen Murrell calls “political nerds and Trump obsessives” (guilty as charged).

And it’s the fly-on-the-wall aspect that Murrell homes in on. Haberman and Swan are seriously credentialed reporters of the Trump era, and their access to the US president’s inner circle is extraordinary. Most of the information in this 496-page book has been sourced on what journalists call “deep background”, an agreement between a reporter and their source that they can use information without attributing it.

But some of the direct quotes, including plenty of rather florid language from the 47th president about various of his political enemies, almost makes you feel as if you are in the room with him. Which, as Murrell observes here, feels like an invitation to play the time-honoured journalists’ parlour game: who blabbed?

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One of the themes that anyone following the first 18 months of Trump’s second term will have identified is the way that the US president has sought to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the US Congress. Last month he took to his Truth Social platform to boast of a recent Supreme Court judgment that: “90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!”

The US Supreme Court ruled in June that the president was entitled to sack federal trade commissioner Rebecca Slaughter “at will”, despite an act of Congress and a Supreme Court precedent establishing that the power to appoint and remove the heads of various independent agencies should lie in the hands of Congress.

It’s a big deal which hands US presidents almost monarchical powers, writes Andrea Loux Jarman, an expert in US constitutional law at Bournemouth University. She highlights the words of Associate Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion that the decision “gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted”.

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