What If Zelenskyy Fires Zaluzhnyi?

A Quick Assessment of the Potential Impacts

Image: Kyiv Independent

Over the past 48 hours, there has been considerable speculation about the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy having decided to remove General Zaluzhnyi from his appointment as Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Of course, this is not a new story. The tensions in this relationship have been apparent for some time. During my first 2023 visit to Ukraine early last year, I was informed that Zaluzhnyi wasn’t able to be interviewed as he had been forbidden from speaking to the press without Presidential approval.

The lack of success in the 2023 counter-offensive, and the interview of General Zaluzhnyi by The Economist in late 2023, caused some tensions in the President-Commander-in-Chief relationship. Additionally, private and public perceptions about Zaluzhnyi’s presidential aspirations (and these are just speculation) all appear to have built to a civil-military crisis in the past few days.

But what might be the implications?

It should be stated up front that in peace and war, tensions are always present in civil-military relationships. There is sufficient modern scholarship on this topic that demonstrates this working tension between national leaders and the most senior military commanders in countries. Works by people like Risa Brooks and Eliot Cohen, which have explored this topic through the lens of multiple nations, are well worth reviewing in this regard.

But one thing above all others should be remembered. In democracies, civilian-military relationships is an unequal dialog. The civilian leader always has primacy.

If Zaluzhnyi is indeed removed (this has not been official confirmed yet), there are sure to be many examinations of the wreckage that got us to this point. It will be an important case study of wartime civil-military relations that will hone our understanding of the tensions in leadership, prioritisation, and the development and execution of wartime strategy under modern conditions.

The impact of advanced technologies is changing the character of war. It is inevitable that it will also change the character of modern civil-military relationships.

Seven Possible Impacts

However, undertaking such a case study of contemporary civil-military relationships is not my intention here. My focus instead is on a quick assessment of the key impacts of a General Zaluzhnyi dismissal by President Zelenskyy. I believe there are seven key impacts.

Impact 1: Command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. General Zaluzhnyi has been a charismatic and popular military leader who anticipated and prepared in the weeks before the Russian large-scale invasion. This almost certainty preserved important elements of the Ukrainian military that were key to defeating Russia’s advance on Kyiv. Zaluzhnyi is also an intellectual leader, having written influential articles on the trajectory of the war and Ukraine’s strategy.

General Zaluzhnyi also cares deeply for the lives of his troops, and is not an overtly political general. This is not a common combination. It is what sets Zaluzhnyi apart from his peers. This mix of professional competence, delegation, intellectual humility and curiosity are vital strategic leadership traits and will be hard to replace.

Impact 2: Successive changes down the military chain of command. A Zaluzhnyi removal would assume that a suitable replacement is found. There has been speculation about at least two contenders. But in every high-level appointment there are successive moves of personnel that occur well down the chain of command.

This will be a little disruptive to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. But such moves and disruptions are also what military organisations are designed for.  They are designed to lose people and close up those gaps afterwards. This applies to senior leaders as well. It might also be noted that any change in the commander-in-chief will also change the fortunes of many other senior military leaders. Some will rise who were not previously, and some who were previously on the rise will stagnate.

Impact 3: Advice to the President. A key role of the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is military advice to the President. This will obviously change if a new commander-in-chief is appointed. Given Zaluzhnyi’s deep experience as commander-in-chief in this war, and his other many qualities described above, it will take the new commander-in-chief time to settle in. This will be magnified if there is a wholesale turnover in senior staff in the Ukrainian high command.

Impact 4: Relationships with allies and security partners. While the Ukrainian Defence Minister is the primary interlocutor with foreign nations on military assistance, the requests of support from allies and partners this is primarily based on priorities provided by General Zaluzhnyi and his key staff. The commander-in-chief also maintains close links with US and NATO military chiefs, which provide an excellent sounding board for both sides of the relationship and are vital for implementing military assistance that is gained by the Ukrainian Defence Minister.

These close military-to-military links would have to be re-established if a new Ukrainian commander-in-chief is appointed.  This would take time.  But new relationship building would be facilitated by the enormous good will towards Ukraine among NATO military institutions.

Impact 5: Perceptions of government instability. This is a real danger area for President Zelenskyy and his government. There may be some, particularly in the U.S. Congress, who could exploit a change in the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and any public fallout afterwards, as additional evidence for why they shouldn’t support further packages of U.S. assistance for Ukraine.

This would be strategically immoral. And as the Director of the CIA has recently stated in a Foreign Affairs article, not providing this additional military assistance to Ukraine would risk a mistake “of historic proportions.” To prevent such an eventuality in the fallout after a potential dismissal of Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian government narrative, diplomacy and information strategy in the wake of any removal of the commander-in-chief would be vital to get right.

Impact 6: Russian information operations. The Russian president, who has been more visible recently, is acting as if he is on the road to victory in Ukraine. This is a deliberate strategy to influence his own domestic audience in the lead up to the March Russian elections, U.S. Congress members, and other politicians around the world, that Russian victory is inevitable and that ongoing military support for Ukraine is wasted.

Any removal of General Zaluzhnyi would play into this Russian strategic narrative. While the removal of the commander-in-chief is the prerogative of a civilian leader in any democracy, it will still come with political and strategic information costs. These need to be anticipated and planned for.

Impact 7: The Future of General Zaluzhnyi. A final impact will be around the immediate and medium-term future of Zaluzhnyi should he be removed from his current post. The current commander-in-chief won’t just disappear if he is indeed dismissed by President Zelenskyy. While it has been reported that he has been offered alternative national security appointments, finding the right appointment for General Zaluzhnyi will be difficult.

Zaluzhnyi has experience, stature, networks and leadership skills that will be difficult to reconcile with staff appointments. My sense however is that while Zaluzhnyi will not want to go, he is also first and foremost a soldier and servant of his country. He will not want to make the war effort more difficult for his nation by drawing out potential removal by the President.

I also won’t address presidential aspirations here. Projecting such aspirations on Zaluzhnyi without evidence is unfair to him.

A Ukrainian Civil-Military Relations Crisis

In conclusion, the civil-military relationship between the Ukrainian President and his military commander-in-chief at present is clearly at breaking point. It has, or may soon, reach a place where only one of two things can happen. First, a significant reconciliation takes place, and Zaluzhnyi is left in his current appointment (although speculation on the relationship is sure to continue). Or, second, someone has to go. In a democracy, that ‘someone’ in civil-military crises is always the senior military person. This is an important norm.

Regardless of the outcome of the current crisis, there will be important lessons for Ukrainians, and foreign observers to learn about the conduct of civil-military relations under the intense pressure of war.

For now, there remains an abundance of ambiguity about what might transpire in this situation over the next few hours and days.

Like many, I am a huge admirer of General Zaluzhnyi and the stellar leadership he has provided to the Ukrainian military during this war. He has done a magnificent job of bringing together the physical, moral and intellectual aspects of Ukrainian fighting power to defend his people and his homeland against a large, brutal invader. Regardless of what happens in the coming days, he will take his place in the pantheon of great generals of history.

But, unfortunately, if the current speculation about the relationship between the Ukrainian President and his commander-in-chief continues, the situation may approach a point of no return in this relationship. That would be a tragedy for Ukraine and its military personnel. However, such crises are also the nature of civil-military relationships in democracies during peace and war.