Zelensky has replaced half of his cabinet. It’s a normal thing in Ukraine where nobody wants the repetition of Brezhnevism, with its senile, doddering leaders who can’t be removed from their jobs except by death. The war is entering a new stage, so it makes sense to have new people with new ideas.
It’s strange to see this strategy criticized by people whose leadership freezes up, rambles off, and remains in the same job from AIDS to COVID.
A government job shouldn’t be a lifetime sinecure. People in government jobs for 60 years, that’s corruption. New people coming in at regular intervals to avoid sclerotization of government is not.
The owner of the large publishing house I talked to yesterday is younger than me by about a decade. She’s a regular person who worked for another publisher. Then she had an idea for a new type of publishing that her employer didn’t believe in (non-fiction not in translation but by Ukrainian authors). She started her own business, bootstrapped it from the ground up, and now it’s the largest publisher of non-fiction and classical literature in the country. That’s how it should be. Young people should have opportunities and not marinate in uncertainty until somebody pushing ninety finally decides to step down.
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