The general Zelensky fired had the right idea all along. From Ted Snider at theamericanconservative.com:
The war’s developments are at this point predictable, and favor Russian objectives.
The former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, assessed on November 1 of last year that Ukraine would lose the war. It had reached a “stalemate” that favored Russia because such attritional wars are “beneficial to one of the parties to the conflict” and, in this case, “it is the Russian Federation” because of its superiority in numbers of both men and weapons.
That was also the fate Zaluzhny assessed for the town of Avdiivka. In December 2023, Zaluzhny said that the battle of Avdiivka would ultimately favor the larger side and that Russia “has the ability to concentrate its forces…. And they can make it so that in two-three months the town will have the same fate as Bakhmut,” which had already fallen to the Russians. Zaluzhny favored prioritizing the lives of his soldiers and withdrawing to more defensible positions.
That was not what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to hear from his top general. Zelensky favored staying on the offensive, advancing every day and holding Avdiivka at all costs. Zelensky demanded that the armed forces reclaim all Ukrainian territory lost since 2014, not lose more.
That disagreement led to Zaluzhny’s firing. Though there were likely other reasons, some of them political, Zelensky’s desire for “the same vision of the war” was a key one.
The same vision of the war was shared by General Oleksandr Syrsky, who had led the battle of Bakhmut—the very battle Zaluzhny invoked when predicting the fate of Avdiivka. Zaluzhny saw the stubborn fight for Bakhmut as a strategic miscalculation that was too heavy in losses of equipment and, more importantly, in lives.
