A reset of Ukraine’s leadership is necessary and could involve several personnel shakeups beyond the military, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Feb. 4 interview, according to Italian media outlet Rai News.
Responding to a question about a rumored dismissal of Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, President Zelensky said he had a serious reset in mind that was not about a single person, but about the general direction of the country’s leadership.
The change could involve replacing a series of state leaders, he said, according to Rai News.
And from the Kyiv Independent’s reporting, it sounds like they were asking anyone they could on background and getting completely contradictory answers from both the military and political side. But, I don’t believe the US would accept that they were firing him from some unknown in the Ukrainian government and I don’t think WaPo or Reuters would run stories based on nobodies (at least 2) in the US government.
So your theory that it could be a feint to bait Russia makes more sense to me than this being Russian propaganda.
If it’s not, you’d think they’d want to rip the band-aid off quickly to limit confusion though, given how widespread and pernicious Russian propaganda is.
… or make a super quiet transition and just announce it weeks after it was done. I would imagine that something like that couldn’t be hidden very well since spy culture in that part of the world is practically an open lifestyle.