Warn in advance that you are 15 minutes late for the interview and that’s how it is. Maximum punctuality. Before beginning to answer in a room with the windows covered with boards, the governor apologizes for taking one last phone call with one of his two cell phones. Colonel Yuri Malashko, 48, enters the Zaporizhia regional government headquarters from the Huliaipole front, one of the hot spots of the current Ukrainian counteroffensive. His forecast does not hide the fact that they are facing a difficult challenge. “Getting back to the sea is going to be very difficult because the Russians have been digging defenses for over a year,” he admits.
The governor of Zaporizhia refers to one of the highest aspirations of the local army in its current offensive, which is to reach the coast of the Azov Sea and cut an essential corridor for communications and the infrastructure of the Russian occupation. This corridor allows Moscow to connect the Crimean peninsula, in its hands since 2014, with the Ukrainian region of Donbas and the Russian Rostov region. The local troops, who are advancing very little by little, are still at a distance of between 80 and 100 kilometers from that objective. “The people there are waiting for us. It is true that some cooperate with the Russian Federation, but others are waiting for the vacancy and the liberation of our territories”, Malashko comments during the conversation last Wednesday.
As head of the Military Administration (governor), he is the highest authority in a region that has occupied 67% of its territory by invading soldiers, that is, two thirds of its 27,100 square kilometers (some 5,000 more than the largest province of Spain, which is Badajoz). In addition to this strategic corridor, the Russians also maintain the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, under their control on the banks of the Dnieper River.
Among the sea of difficulties that Malashko has to face is the evacuation of people affected by the conflict and their accommodation outside their usual place of residence, either in the Zaporizhia region or in other parts of the country. In addition, she has to deal with the presence of the civilian population that lives in the vicinity of the line of combat and the need for them to receive humanitarian aid. In this sense, she highlights the creation of an information point in the regional capital where the urgent needs of the population and the work of humanitarian organizations are centralized.
He calculates that in the 30-kilometer strip around the zone of hostilities there are some 800 families, although it is a figure, he says, that varies every day. Some live in towns deeper than others in the areas where there is the most fighting. The two days that EL PAÍS has visited Mala Tokmachka, one of the spearheads of the Ukrainian advance, has barely seen a trace of civilians and almost all that is observed are soldiers settled in the homes of neighbors who have left the town.
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But among those hundreds of families that remain there are some 1,300 minors, despite the fact that, by law, the Government requires that they be evacuated. “We pay special attention to the children, who we try to get out of there. Thank God there aren’t many”, but “we can’t take them from them by force”, admits Malashko. Behind the presence of these irreducible people there are people who refuse to be evacuated. “Sometimes, people stay and wait for our victory,” the governor tries to justify.
In the same way, the Russian authorities that hold power in occupied areas sometimes organize population movements to remove civilians from locations where the distance from the enemy is narrowing. This happened last month in 18 municipalities in the region with children accompanied by their parents, the elderly, disabled people and the wounded by order of the governor that Russia has appointed in the occupied part of the region, Yevgeni Balitski. Zaporizhia is, together with Donetsk, Lugansk and Kherson, one of the four regions that, since last year, Moscow unilaterally, illegally and without any external recognition, considers part of its territory.
Malashko’s role oscillates between the civilian and the military, although officially in his current position he is not part of the army. “Our main task is to protect the region as much as possible from the advance of the enemy. The second is unemployment and all the issues that will have to be resolved afterwards. These issues affect both the civilian population and the military, ”he details. Although both parties, the army and the governor, have “close cooperation”, he says that he has nothing to do with the arrival and movement of weapons or the supply of fuel, which is “the prerogative of the Ministry of Defense”. Yes, on the other hand, they collaborate with the military in the supply and maintenance of drones or providing camouflage nets for vehicles, as well as other needs that he prefers not to specify.
Although he refuses to enter into the military and strategic plot, the governor highlights the difficulty that it will entail for the troops to overcome the extensive defenses established in recent months along hundreds of kilometers by the Russians and which have come to be qualified after their satellite analysis as one of the strongest since World War II.
Malashko has been in the military for three decades. He has held his current position in Zaporizhia since February, coming from the neighboring Donetsk region, where the war began in 2014. There he was one of the heads of the Intelligence Services (SBU). His appointment came directly from the hand of President Volodímir Zelenski, who began 2023 with an intense purge in the Administration on suspicion of corruption, embezzlement or treason for collaborating with the enemy.
In recent months, in addition to Zaporizhia, those responsible for the Kiev, Odessa, Kherson, Dnipro, Lugansk, Sumi and Khmelnitsky regions have left their posts. There has also been a cleanup at the level of ministries and state agencies, in some of whose offices large amounts of money from bribes or from inflating prices of basic material necessary to face the war appeared. In July of last year, the president dismissed the top head of the SBU, until then considered his closest entourage, and the attorney general, accused along with more than 600 people of providing information to the enemy.
“Any internal problem that hinders the State is being eliminated and will continue to be eliminated. It is fair, it is necessary for our defense and it helps our rapprochement with the European institutions”, said Zelenski in his address on January 24. “We need a strong state, and Ukraine will be just that.” In the midst of the rain of millions that Kiev receives to be able to face the invasion, concerns about the burden of the high level of corruption surface, which placed this country at 122 out of 180 in 2021, according to the scale of Transparency International.
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