Media: Ukraine has plan if Russia assassinates Zelenskyy

When Volodymyr Zelenskyy was asked whether he was worried by Russian attempts to kill him, he answered he couldn’t afford to be, Report informs, citing Politico.

In an interview with CNN last month, he said if he was thinking about it constantly, he would just shut himself down. “Of course, my bodyguards should think how to prevent this from happening, and this is their task. I don’t think about it.”

According to the publication, no wonder Russian lawmakers and ultra-nationalist military bloggers have formed a chorus demanding he be targeted:

The author noted that given the stakes, and the risk, it is little wonder Ukrainian officials tend to brush off requests to discuss what would happen were Russia to succeed - or they decline to go on the record, worrying the topic appears far too macabre.

And yet, despite the reluctance to publicly engage with the question, there is a plan in place, according to interviews with Ukrainian officials and lawmakers as well as analysts. Indeed, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said as much: “The Ukrainians have plans in place — that I’m not going to talk about or get into any details on — to make sure that there is what we would call ‘continuity of government’ one way or another,” he told CBS news last year.

Because of the threat looming over his life, Zelenskyy’s overseas visits are planned with the greatest secrecy. Ukrainian officials were left fuming last February when a planned visit to Brussels was leaked three days before his expected arrival, jeopardizing his trip.

Formally, under the constitution, the line of succession is clear. “When the president is unable to fulfill his duties, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine [the Ukrainian parliament] takes over his responsibilities,” said Mykola Knyazhytsky, an opposition lawmaker from the western city of Lviv. “Therefore, there would be no power vacuum.”

The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada - Ruslan Stefanchuk, a member of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party - doesn’t have an especially high trust rating in opinion polls. It is around 40 percent, less than half of Zelenskyy’s. And he’s not popular with opposition lawmakers.

“But I don’t think it matters,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “There’s a strong leadership team and I think we would see collective government,” he added.

The governing council would most likely consist of Stefanchuk as the figurehead, along with Andrii Yermak, the former movie producer and lawyer who’s the head of the office of the president, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Valery Zaluzhny would remain as the country’s top general.

"The country has reached a point of very substantial solidarity and national unity, so if something terrible happened to Zelenskyy it would not be as decisive as you might think,” said Karatnycky, author of "Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the Russian War."