FLASH
Shkruar nga Francesco Battistini
Corruption allegations against his closest leaders, job cuts, are shaking the Kiev leader. Will he be able to turn things around and emerge stronger?
Isn't this what a president's funeral is like? Lower your voice and put down flags, lay flowers on your grudges: at noon on the Maidan, in a procession of vans with flashing blue lights, the coffin of a fallen soldier in Donetsk passes.
Passersby kneel. Vehicles stop. Bars turn down the music and everyone gets up from their tables. Even the group of women who every Saturday morning shout and ask where their sons and husbands have disappeared to, who went to the front and never returned, are silent.
Political comedy gives way to real tragedy, for a few minutes. "Don't tell us anything!" is written on a yellow and blue sign.
"We're in the dark, Zelensky! Turn on some lights!" The stage's attention remains on the comedian-turned-president. And the sins of the godfather do not fall on the father of the country.
But what kind of Zelensky will we have, CNN asks immediately after Yermak's resignation: stronger or weaker, more lucid or more confused? Will Kiev's "clean hands" be enough to face the challenges, which remain where they are?
To go to Washington, Zelensky entrusted the delegation to Rustem Umerov. They call him a "clean face" because he had already been called to the Ministry of Defense to replace the controversial Minister Oleksii Reznikov, but in reality it is "a worrying decision," writes Kyiv Post: the Umerov family, for example, owns eight luxury properties in the US, which are unknown to tax authorities.
And it was also Umerov that Zelensky had in mind when he tried to pass a law limiting the investigative powers of his associates. Perhaps radical action was needed, critics say, as anger grows over energy bribes and Russia is bombing its own power grid. On Friday evening alone, as Yermak’s home was being searched by anti-corruption officials, an estimated 600,000 Ukrainians were left in the cold and freezing temperatures due to power outages.
There is a confidential plan to measure the “amount of war” that can still be tolerated in Ukrainian society, before discontent and fatigue take over. This level, measured by economic factors and population stress, is dangerously approaching, and Zelensky is aware of it. On the ground, fog is the main enemy these days: it is hampering the defense of Pokrovsk, in Donetsk, and planes are trying to hit enemy positions. The problem now is that the Russians, when they occupy a city, no longer occupy schools or town halls, turning them into barracks and risking becoming easy targets, but instead disperse into abandoned houses, warehouses and farms, often mixing with Ukrainian civilians: their identification and targeting is increasingly complicated.
Shortly after Yermak was fired, Zelensky called Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal and decided to start there: he would change his military strategy to adapt to the new reality on the ground. “We need to better protect the power plants,” he says. And he would provide more drones (recently purchased in the UK) and more money for combat brigades, to appease the discontent of exhausted troops, furious at their leaders’ thefts after months without leave.
"In the coming days," Zelensky promises, "we will determine steps to end the war."
The Ukrainian leader will meet with Emmanuel Macron tomorrow, and it will be the first time he has been without Yermaku. An absence that weakens him, now that Donald Trump is said to have prepared a document on US recognition of Crimea and other territories occupied by Russia. Other Russia-US trade deals that will bypass Kiev, on rare metals, gas, space and US investments in Russia, as listed by the Wall Street Journal, also require more radical choices: "Why focus on Umerov and not on our diplomats?" asks the Ukrainian press, recalling that "the fact that Zelensky has a friend and business partner to negotiate means imitating Trump, who relies on his golf buddy Steve Witkoff."
There is no real name yet to fill Yermak's place, but the Ukrainian president cannot wait too long.
The cleanup operation could restore Zelensky's shine. And some are optimistic.
“Let’s call him by his name,” says Olga Rudenko, editor of the Kyiv Independent, adding, “this change is good news. Think about it: a young democracy like Ukraine has independent institutions strong enough to investigate the most powerful man in the country. And it allows itself to do this during wartime. Ukraine is not just a place on the map, but a country that lives by certain values and fights for them. Today we see them, these values.” /Adapted from Corriere/
Lini një Përgjigje