The Ukrainian chief of staff, Valeri Zalouzhny, remains, despite growing tensions with Volodymyr Zelensky over military strategy and the mobilization demanded by the military. This was the crucial question at the Ukrainian president’s annual press conference, held on Tuesday, December 19. The latter chose to minimize their dispute. Perhaps because the head of state’s confidence rating is experiencing a significant erosion (62%, compared to 84% a year earlier), while that of Valeri Zalouzhny remains at a very high level (88%), according to the Ukrainian polling institute KMIS.
Sometimes relaxed, sometimes emotional, Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that he maintains “professional relations” with the chief of staff and avoided criticism of him. It also did not satisfy the generals who are calling for mobilization to allow a rotation of soldiers fighting for almost two years against Russian troops.
The Ukrainian army, which is struggling to find volunteers, has offered to mobilize “450,000 to 500,000 people”, Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Tuesday, specifying that he had not yet made a decision, because he said he had need “more arguments supporting this idea.” No longer ruling out lowering the age of eligible men to 25, he on the other hand firmly ruled out the call for women to serve in the army.
The latter’s engagement in the army is only on a voluntary basis. A massive and compulsory mobilization risks weighing heavily on the popularity rating of the president, elected in 2019 with 73% of the vote. Due to martial law, the presidential election, which was to be held in March 2024, was postponed indefinitely.
Often difficult questions
For his annual press conference in the form of taking stock of the past year, the Ukrainian president faced a barrage of often difficult questions, unlike the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, who engaged in an apparently similar exercise on December 14. The difference was that most of the questions in Russia were of a sycophantic nature.
Faced with suggestions of changes in his team and unresolved corruption cases, Volodymyr Zelensky replied that he continued to trust his administration, which was working “with very limited resources” and that the fight against corruption would continue. He has not given a clear answer to the serious problem of lack of ammunition for the Ukrainian artillery, which is struggling to resist a much better equipped adversary.
Determined to present a positive result in a gloomy military and diplomatic conjecture, the head of state stressed that Ukraine has not ceded territory in 2023 and “will fight until victory”. To the central question Ukrainians are asking about whether the fighting will end, he responded: “No one knows when the war will end, [but] the more we Ukrainians mobilize, the sooner it will end. »
Many questions revolved around weakening international support for the country. Here again, Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to find a victory in the opening of negotiations for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union, adopted on December 14 by the heads of state and government meeting in Brussels. He also said he was “convinced that the United States will not let us go”, despite the blocking of military aid by the American Congress. A few minutes later, however, he conceded that a return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 could have a “strong impact” on the evolution of the war in Ukraine.
“If the next president’s policy, whoever he is, is different towards Ukraine, colder, or more economical, then I think those signals will have a very strong impact on the course of the war.” , he agreed, adding that Donald Trump would “probably lead a different policy.”