The inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January as the 47th President of the United States of America is turning to be a new chapter in the war in Ukraine. With Trump’s return, many people believe, and even more hope, that Ukraine is already on the threshold of peace. But do Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov share this view? What do their latest moves indicate? And how does the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas see the choice between further funding the war and peace?
The troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces try to prevent further loss of territory. However, the Ukrainian army has been facing serious problems with with rotation of soldiers, which has led to the exhaustion and demotivation of soldiers in combat units. At the end of last year, a new trend was revealed: the mass desertion of Ukrainian soldiers sent for training abroad.
The 155th Mechanised Brigade named after Anna of Kyiv, currently deployed on the Pokrovsk front, has undergone training in France. According to a French military official, there have been a certain number of desertions among Ukrainians. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that the Ukrainian Armed Forces Command had initiated an inspection into the 155th Brigade over cases of unauthorised abandonment of service by some soldiers. According to media information, President Zelenskyy took the situation with the 155th Brigade under his personal control.
The desertion incident took place when Taras Chmut, the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation spoke about chaos in the command structure in an interview with Ukrainian Pravda on 24 December. ’We created this chaos in the military command structure by delaying the adoption of the mobilisation law, postponing appropriate personnel appointments, and encouraging the ambitions of certain young officers to lead larger units.’, he said. ’We plug holes on the front line with these attached units, exhausting those soldiers. Meanwhile, we find replacements somewhere, mobilise them, train them, pull others out of recovery, and plug the same gaps all over again. The problem is that strategically, the problem of command and control remains unresolved. On paper, there are plenty of troops, weapons, equipment and ammunition along the front line – yet the front is collapsing. It’s not because the soldiers aren’t fighting. It’s because of the chaos in the command structure.’, he explained.
And, what was Zelenskyy’s response to the obvious problems in the military? On 30 December, he appointed journalist and human rights activist Olha Reshetylova to the post of Presidential Commissioner for the Protection of the Rights of Servicemen and Family Members of Soldiers, shortly, military ombudswoman. Her office is also working on cases involving missing soldiers from the 155th Mechanised Brigade. The same day Zelenskyy also announced that the process for soldiers and sergeants with combat experience to obtain officer ranks has been simplified. Later, in mid-January the Ukrainian MoD announced that basic military training will be launched for Ukrainian university students in September. It consists of 90 hours of theory lessons and 210 hours of practical sessions at Armed Forces centres and other designated facilities. The Defence Ministry said that students will take a military oath, receive a certificate, and be assigned a military speciality upon completing the basic military training course.
It seems that neither President Zelenskyy nor the Ukrainian MoD are willing to understand the new circumstances and the acute problems. The same approach is demonstrated by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas, who has said before a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, also known as the Ramstein Group, at Ramstein Air Base on 9 January that the European Union is prepared to take the initiative ’if the United States is not ready for it’.
Parts of Ukraine are completely ruined; Ukrainian cities like Chernihiv, Odessa and Kryvyy Ryh (which is Zelenskyy’s birth place) are subject to daily Russian missile attacks; despite being a military secret, it is widely known that the total number of Ukrainian casualties, both military and civilian, stands at several hundreds of thousands; the Register of Damage Caused by the Russian Federation’s Aggression against Ukraine (Register of Damage for Ukraine) began accepting compensation claims from people who lost family members as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; lastly, when Donald Trump took office as President of the United States he said that he considers his top foreign policy priority ’to be a peacemaker and unifier of the world’.
What else do Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s military leadership need to understand that the time for change has come?!
From now on, they are personally responsible for further human losses, moreover, EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, also shares responsibility in all this.
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