Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has fired the country’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, after a tumultuous week in which he also fired his defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.
The firing of the popular defense minister, who is credited by many as the mastermind of Ukraine’s successful drone strategy, brought thousands to the streets in protest.
Despite clear public pressure to fire Syrskyi, Zelensky has presented his departure as part of a general restructuring of Ukraine’s armed forces. He has appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi, commander of the Ukrainian joint forces group, to take over as commander-in-chief.
Much of the analysis of this episode has focused on the personalities, presenting it as one personal conflict within Zelensky’s team.
Some saw the president’s decision to side with Syrskyi’s unpopular Soviet-style military leadership rather than the popular modernizer as illogical. But our research shows that the tensions between the minister of civil defense and the military leadership are institutional.
Where such conflicts arise, war makes it logical for the president to side with the commander-in-chief. Zelensky’s recent dismissal of Syrsky due to public pressure will not change this dynamic.
There is disagreement between the civilian and military leadership normal in any countrydemocratic or otherwise. There will inevitably be conflicting interests. Democratic civilian control – civilian oversight of the military with a clear chain of responsibility – helps manage these differences on a daily basis.
However, war exacerbates normal competing interests and their political significance because of the existential threat. In Ukraine, institutional weaknesses make such conflicts more likely and more difficult to resolve.
Zelensky’s dismissal of Fedorov highlights a pattern identified in our research of the period between 2019, when Zelensky was elected, and 2022, when Putin began his full-scale takeover.
Democratic civilian control of the military was an official goal in line with NATO/EU requirements. lEGISLATION it was passed but its implementation was hampered by the limited acceptance by key people of the core idea – the notion that the defense minister should be a civilian.
Our interviews with participants in the defense reform process immediately before the full 2022 invasion made it clear that the military leadership was, perhaps predictably, resisting all manifestations of civilian control.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Zelensky remained ambivalent about even his most basic request (a civil defense minister). One Ukrainian defense expert picked up on this, telling us that Zelensky “failed to understand the logic that civilians should do strategic policymaking.”
In accordance with 2018 law approved after Western pressure, since 2019 Zelensky has appointed five civilians as defense ministers. But people we spoke to explained that he has always relied on the commander-in-chief for defense policymaking.
This has marginalized successive defense ministers and their attempts at reform – whether modest or radical.
It does not help that the ministry has faced repeated corruption scandals in relation to defense procurement. Three men who served civil defense ministers between 2010 and 2014 (plus chief of staff 2012-14) are now accused of treason for allegedly selling military equipment without authorization.
This has made it particularly challenging to establish the trust necessary for a functional relationship between military and civilian leadership.
Institutionalized conflict
The minister’s removal was possible because the 2018 law preserved a legacy Soviet system where both the minister and the commander-in-chief were both separately accountable to the president.
This meant that military chiefs tended to resist taking strategic direction from the minister—usually a central tenet of democratic civilian control. When they disagreed with the minister, the military commanders went directly to the president.
The conflict resurfaced despite personnel changes. For example, one senior figure we interviewed told us that, between 2017 and 2019, Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak and his military counterpart, Lieutenant General Viktor Muzhenko “wouldn’t even be in the same room together.” According to our sources, during 2019-2020, relations between General Ruslan Khomchak and the new minister Andriy Zagorodniuk “went south very quickly”.
Zagorodniuk, a reformer, was then fired by Zelensky after just six months. In 2020-21, Khomchak’s conflict with Zagorodniuk’s successor Andriy Taran took place spectacularly public when one sues another.
During 2020-2021 there was a big push by reformers in the ministry, parliament, civil society and by Western defense advisers to resolve this institutional conflict by subordinating the commander-in-chief to the minister. But this reform failed. The military leadership resisted forcefully and Zelensky did not intervene.
All roads lead to Zelensky
Military resistance was predictable because in Ukraine’s weakly institutionalized power system, the president is the main political player.
Access to him remains the most valuable political asset. The ongoing war made Zelensky more dependent on senior military forces. He needed their trust in the face of the threat from Russia.
Our research shows that Zelensky is more likely to side with the military leadership in the event of a conflict with the defense minister. In the latest crisis, he also initially sided with his general – although this time it triggered a political crisis and the president was forced to fire the military leader as well.
A long existential war is a complicating factor for civil-military relations because public interest in defense policy is much higher than in peacetime. Fedorov came to symbolize a more modern and high-tech approach to warfare, in contrast to Syrsky’s Soviet style of military leadership. with protest demanding Syrskyi’s resignation and Zelensky keen to maintain public confidence, a change of commander-in-chief became inevitable.
But the new personnel will not change the fundamental structures that generated the political crisis in the first place. Civilian control of the military remains contested. Meanwhile, the institutional arrangement allows the military leadership to override ministers and causes conflict – and war strengthens the military’s ability to resist reforms that might change this.
Sarah Whitmore is an associate professor of politics, Oxford Brookes University AND Bettina Renz is a professor of international security, University of Nottingham
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
