Half a year has lasted the most followed political soap opera of the war in Ukraine. The dismissal of Oleksii Reznikov, still acting Defense Minister today, was an open secret since last February, when members of the president’s party, Volodimir Zelenski, assumed that his removal would take place at that time. Since then there has not been a month in which the media —and the affected person himself— did not speculate on the moment of his departure. The preparations for the counteroffensive postponed a decision that Zelensky had already made, according to his faithful, to show that the fight against corruption is as important as the one fought on the battlefield.
Zelensky announced this Sunday that he would propose to the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, the dismissal of Reznikov (57 years old). The reason, according to the head of state, is that the Ministry of Defense needs a new direction. Reznikov has been a key asset in Ukraine’s strategy for negotiating foreign military aid. Lawyer and career military man during the Soviet Union, his ability to establish strong personal relationships with his counterparts in NATO member states have been key in the defense of his country. Reznikov, like Zelensky, has not missed an opportunity to meet with Western politicians and military high command. With the head of Defense of Spain, Margarita Robles, he visited the city of Odesa in December 2022, and last April he went to Madrid to meet with her. “It is an honor and a satisfaction to receive my dear friend Oleksii”, emphasized Robles.
In his farewell letter, in which he confirmed his dismissal to the Rada, Reznikov stressed that in the year and a half of war that he has been at the Defense front, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have managed to expel the invaders from 50% of the territories they had occupied, from the failed Russian offensive on Kiev, to the liberation of the Kharkov province or half of the Kherson province. But this has not been enough to save him in office.
treason
A priority for Zelensky is to send signals to his citizens and to Europe that he is fighting the systemic corruption that the country suffers from. Ukraine has been a candidate to join the European Union since June 2022. The European Commission has stressed that improving levels of corruption, especially by senior government officials, is an unavoidable priority for membership. Since last year, Zelensky has approved dozens of dismissals linked to wartime corruption cases, and has also strengthened the independence of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and given greater powers to the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption. Embezzlement scandals are constant, in all areas of public administration, but those linked to the Armed Forces, and the country’s defense budget, carry a significance that the president himself admitted this August when proposing to the Rada that they equate to those of treason.
The United States and the countries of the European Union have provided Ukraine with aid valued at more than 165,000 million euros in a year and a half, most of it to its Armed Forces. kyiv’s allies are demanding more and more transparency and the accumulation of information about corruption in the Ministry of Defense was unsustainable. Reznikov is not accused of any wrongdoing, but he himself has conceded that he is ultimately responsible for what has happened in his ministry. And what has happened has unnerved Ukrainian public opinion.
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First it was a million-dollar contract, investigated by the courts, for the purchase of food rations for the troops. The contract was signed with inflated prices and with fewer quantities than stipulated. Then there was another scandal over the purchase, allegedly at prices well above average market cost, of uniforms for the army. Zelensky also fired in August all those responsible for the provincial recruitment offices of the Armed Forces in the face of a succession of evidence of bribes paid by thousands of Ukrainian men not to be enlisted.
At the beginning of this year, when more voices called for his dismissal, Reznikov was focused on negotiations with Ukraine’s allied countries to provide a new phase of weapons that would allow the current counteroffensive against Russian defenses to be launched with guarantees. His removal would then have meant a major setback for the Ukrainian military options at the front.
The Ministry of Defense and the Ukrainian Armed Forces are not the only sources of corruption linked to the money the country must spend to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Zelenski relieved the leadership of the border control department last February due to irregularities detected in the customs service. “The situation has only gotten worse during the war,” said Danilo Hermantsev, a deputy from the Servant of the People, Zelensky’s party, and head of the parliamentary committee on finance, taxes and tariffs at the time. In the last year, EL PAÍS has received several complaints from donors of aid to the army about alleged demands for bribes at the border to speed up the process of importing the material that must be destined for the defense of the country, be they off-road vehicles or non-standard equipment. lethal.
Sources from the United States Government and from a Ministry of Foreign Affairs of a Member State of the European Union have explained to this newspaper in recent days that they are reinforcing their alternative information network to the official one in Kiev to monitor the destination of the aid that supply to Ukraine.
Zelenski has confirmed that his hard core is studying calling presidential and legislative elections in 2024. The president’s term ends next March and the elections for the Rada should be held this October. The constitution and martial law prohibit elections in wartime, but Zelensky’s trusted men, such as parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk, have taken it for granted that a legal reform will be proposed to make the election possible. Ukrainian reference media such as Pravda and Telegraph, In addition to experts consulted this August by EL PAÍS, they have indicated that the main reason for calling the Ukrainians to the polls is the progressive loss of popularity of Zelenski and his party. This loss of support has to do in large part, as explained by Mark Savchuk, adviser to the National Anti-Corruption Office, with the fact that the population does not detect that the profound reforms promised by the president to democratize and cleanse the country of corruption are being materializing.
Reznikov’s downfall is understood in this context. Various Ukrainian media outlets have suggested that he could be appointed Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK. Half a year ago, when Zelensky’s party reported that Reznikov’s hours were numbered, there was speculation that he would be put in charge of a new Ministry of Arms Industry.
His successor as defense minister is Rustem Umerov, a Muslim Tatar from Crimea, until now head of Ukraine’s State Property Fund and one of the main prisoner-of-war exchange negotiators with Russia. In addition to Umerov’s proximity to Zelensky, his election has to do with the defense of the Crimean Tatars, a native ethnic group, by the Ukrainian political power, as opponents of the Russian occupation of the Black Sea peninsula and as an example of the respect for the diversity of nationalities living in Ukraine required by the EU to start accession negotiations.
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