Volodymyr Zelensky has sacked a top commander accused of “killing more Ukrainians than any Russian general”.
The Ukrainian president said he was replacing Lt-Gen Yurii Sodol, as the commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces, in his nightly address to the nation late on Monday.
The dismissal came after Bohdan Krotevych, chief of staff of the Azov brigade, called for an investigation into the commander’s poor leadership in a withering letter to Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation.
“I wrote a letter to the SBI calling for an investigation into one military general who, in my opinion, killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any Russian general,” Mr Krotevych later wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
“Sometimes I think the world sends us scumbags to rally us. And all the military now understand what kind of person I’m talking about, because 99 per cent of the military hate him for what he does,” he added, without naming Lt-Gen Sodol.
Mariana Bezuhla, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s defence committee, subsequently claimed the Azov chief was referring to Lt-Gen Sodol in a social media post.
Mr Zelensky did not outline why he had decided to replace the spurned military leader.
The Ukrainian leader only announced that he had replaced Lt-Gen Sodol with Brig-Gen Andrii Hnatov.
Lt-Gen Sodol was previously the commander of Ukraine’s marines before earning his most recent promotion in February, as part of a wider shake-up of the military command structures.
He had been accused of ordering “suicide missions” by anonymous marines sent across the Dnipro River into Russian-occupied territory.
His dismissal is a sign of the struggles to maintain military unity faced by Mr Zelensky following the sacking of General Valery Zaluzhny as the commander-in-chief of his armed forces.
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