Ukraine’s president has fired the head of the country’s military medical corps.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has insisted on “fundamental” changes to the way the Ukrainian military manages battlefield casualties, after sacking Medical Forces commander Major-General Tatyana Ostashchenko on Sunday evening.
Zelensky’s move came after meeting with the recently-appointed defense minister, Rustem Umerov, amid recriminations in Kiev about the failure of its summer counteroffensive against Russia.
“There is little time left to wait for results. Quick action is needed for forthcoming changes,” Zelensky said, adding that the Ukrainian military needs “a fundamentally new level of medical support.”
Umerov, who replaced Aleksey Reznikov in September, has argued in social media posts that tactical medicine needs to be “digitized” and that there was “simply no place for such problems as subpar tourniquets.”
Anonymous Ukrainian sources who spoke with the British outlet The Daily Telegraph have complained about “substandard” equipment such as field kits Kiev had bought from China. They also claimed that poor training caused combat medics to use tourniquets when there was no need, thereby increasing the number of amputations.
According to Russian estimates, at least 90,000 Ukrainian troops became casualties during the four months of heavy fighting in the south, with little to nothing to show for it. The latest narrative coming out of Kiev was that the “summer counteroffensive” was really just a psychological operation and that the real attack is still to take place.
Ostashchenko is a native of Lviv in western Ukraine and was appointed head of the medical branch in 2021 – the first female branch chief and the first woman major-general in the country’s history, as Kiev had proudly pointed out. She was replaced by Major-General Anatoly Kazmirchuk, the commander of Kiev’s main military hospital.
On Monday, Zelensky also purged the leadership of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP), after its head Yury Shchigol and his deputy Viktor Zhora were implicated in a corruption scheme.
I wonder how much longer the people of Ukraine are going to put up with this…..? Time to negotiate, like it or nor………..
Russia has always held the upper hand in this war, and it has been a costly one for Russia Nato and Ukraine. It will take at least 20 years for Ukraine to recover from it and rebuild with help from Russia. But the true cost will be the lives needlessly lost and the blame for that goes back to 2014 with US interference and dictating their will on overseas policies. Will those same people who caused all of this be at the peace negotiating table – probably not. The end settlement will probably be the end of Zelensky and a little more pay dirt for Russia in some of the eastern territories. But I can predict that if this type of conflict in Ukraine ever happens again Russia will annex all of it. Nato without US help would then not be capable of mounting much of any offensive against Russia. A lot of Nato countries want to drop the wests sanctions with Russia and get back to some sort of normal trade again especially in the energy markets because it is seriously running them all into red ink.