President Volodymyr Zelensky is continuing his large-scale purge of the Ukrainian leadership in an attempt to achieve greater cohesion and efficiency. The Ukrainian president is preparing for a double crisis in which increasing pressure from Russian troops at the front could add to internal destabilization after Zelensky’s presidential term formally expires on May 20. The downside to this purge is that by removing his old friends from Kvartal 95—the TV production company that the comedian-turned-president once founded—from the corridors of power, Zelensky is surrounding himself with the creatures of his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. That leaves the president without any sources of alternative opinions, which has never been good for public administration. It also raises questions about how stable the tandem—increasingly skewed in favor of Yermak—will be, and whether the ambitions of the all-powerful administrator will go into overdrive.
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- United States of America
