Politicians against the army

How Mariana Bezuhla’s statements put an end to the unity of Ukrainians

The public attack of the Servant of the People MP Mariana Bezuhla on the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi became a kind of peak of a series of interviews, statements and comments by representatives of the authorities. In one way or another they were united by one theme – the country’s political leadership feels threatened by a consistently high public trust in the army and General Zaluzhnyi personally, against the background of a gradual decrease in the level of trust in the political leadership itself. And this sense of threat prompts them to take active action.

A few days before Mariana Bezuhla’s scandalous statements, the leader of the Servant of the People faction, Davyd Arakhamia, expressed the same opinion – allegedly, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not have a “war plan” for 2024, because it did not provide it to the MPs at their request . Arakhamia did not specify why he considers himself and his colleagues competent to evaluate the General Staff’s plans, instead of doing their job of finding the necessary military resources to defend the country.

“Servants” want a “magic pill” from the military command – how many more people need to be mobilized to achieve the result that politicians need to maintain ratings and positions in power. The fact that there is simply no such a “magic pill” and that we will have to fight to the end and mobilize as much as is necessary or possible – neither Davyd Arakhamia nor Mariana Bezuhla want to hear or understand.

Since both Arakhamia and Bezuhla criticize the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff for the fact that the military command does not give the Verkhovna Rada a war plan that would satisfy the MPs, it should be remembered to whom exactly the representatives of the Servant of the People faction are demanding to provide information that is one of the biggest state secrets in wartime.

Servant MP Danylo Hetmantsev, during the meeting of the Verkhovna Rada on February 22, 2022, called the proposal to allocate an additional 50 billion hryvnias to the Armed Forces a “political PR”. By that time, all Western intelligence, politicians, mass media, and the Ukrainian GUR had unequivocally claimed that Russia intended to start a full-scale war against Ukraine. And two days later, the bombing of Kyiv and the occupation of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, the siege of Mariupol, and efforts to save the capital from Russian tanks began. Danylo Hetmantsev was at one time an assistant to Volodymyr Sivkovych, a suspect in treason for the benefit of the Russian Federation.

A former colleague of Arakhamia and Bezuhla, MP Oleksandr Dubinsky, became a suspect in the case of high treason, together with the agent of the Russian Federation, MP Andrii Derkach only recently, and after the publication of the alleged recordings of the conversations allegedly between Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko, he switched to criticizing Volodymyr Zelensky. Even after the introduction of US sanctions against him, the Servant of the People could not find the strength to at least exclude Dubinsky from the party, not to mention bringing to justice both him and Andrii Derkach, whom the US State Department directly called a Russian agent.

Oleksii Kovalev, the late colleague of Arakhamia, Bezuhla, Hetmantsev and Dubinsky, switched to the side of the Russians after they occupied Kherson region and took part in a joint event with the occupiers.

After all, it was Davyd Arakhamia who, a few weeks before the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation, called the world media’s warnings about Russian preparations for a full-scale war “fakes”, and said that CNN, Bloomberg and WSJ were “worse than Skabeeva and Solovyov”. Mariana Bezuhla became known to the public not thanks to legislative initiatives, but as a head of the parliamentary commission, which was supposed to investigate the reasons for the leak of information that led to the failure of the intelligence operation to detain the Wagner group representatives in 2020. The work of the commission ended with Bezuhla’s statement that they did not find a documented instruction to postpone the operation, which led to its failure, and Andrii Yermak did not have the authority to issue orders to the intelligence (the head of the President’s office was accused by journalists and the military of opposing their work).

There were at least 20 Servant of the People MPs (among them the above-mentioned Danylo Hetmantsev) who decided to block the law, designed to take the first step on the path of banning the activities of the Russian church in Ukraine even after president Zelensky voiced a public position regarding the need to ban the activities of the Russian church in Ukraine.

The Servant of the People faction has long been unable to gather the necessary number of votes for any of the bills important for the country, and attracted votes “on the sidelines”, including former ‘Opposition Platform – For Life’ representatives.

All these are only the most known scandals. Even if the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the General Staff had any reason to provide Davyd Arakhamia, Mariana Bezuhla or their colleagues with mobilization plans or plans for combat operations, the decision would not be justified.

The mistakes of Bezuhla and her colleagues regarding Russia’s intentions cost Ukraine lost time and opportunities to prepare for war. Because of these mistakes Ukraine entered a full-scale war with an army that was not provided at a sufficient level. The cost was millions of displaced persons, hundreds of thousands of killed, tortured and deported Ukrainians and tens of billions of dollars in damages.

This is a too high a price for Mariana Bezuhla and her colleagues to demand something more from the military, who had to correct the mistakes of politicians with their sweat and blood.

P.S. For 3 days, neither the Servant of the People nor the President’s office could find the strength to publicly condemn Bezuhla’s actions in any way, and therefore it should be assumed that they support these actions, and the attack on the military is a consolidated position of the authorities, and not the initiative of an individual MP.