Kyiv, Ukraine – In recent weeks there have been rumors and allegations about the dismissal of Ukrainian army chief Valerii Zaluzhny.

Last week, several lawmakers and insiders claimed that the taciturn and wildly popular 50-year-old four-star general had been fired and was set to head Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

President Volodymyr Zelensky decided to fire him in early December after Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv, the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper reported, citing an unnamed source.

But on Monday, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said: “This is not true.”

Although the ministry has no influence over Zaluzhny, in the event of a possible dismissal it would have to submit a “recommendation” for his dismissal to Zelensky, Ukraine’s nominal commander-in-chief.

“There is nothing to discuss. There was no dismissal. I have nothing to add,” Zelensky’s spokesman Serhiy Nikiforov said in a televised address on Monday.

But several observers have doubts.

“There was an attempt to convince Zaluzhny to take another job voluntarily and on his own initiative. The attempt was not very successful, so the matter was postponed,” Kyiv-based analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told Al Jazeera.

But the dismissal was “a matter of time and circumstance,” he said.

There are “psychological tensions” between Zaluzhny and the president, who remains dissatisfied with him Failures of last year’s counterattacksaid Fesenko.

Popular despite failures in the counteroffensive

Multiple counterstrikes in late 2022 liberated nearly half of the Russian-occupied territories and reassured the Ukrainian public that the 2023 summer campaign in the east and south would be successful. But Russia took advantage of a lull in hostilities to build layered defenses along the 1,000-kilometer front line and deployed hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers to man them.

Zaluzhny’s month-long counterattack transformed into a trench warfare that resembled World War I, as his forces won, lost and recaptured tiny swaths of territory with staggering losses in soldiers and Western-supplied weapons.

Even the failed mutiny and dissolution of the Wagner mercenary group that led Russia’s advance, did not help the Ukrainian counterattacks.

The failure has been repeatedly blamed on Zaluzhny’s tactical errors and delays in the delivery of Western weapons such as fighter jets and missiles.

Since Zaluzhny did not present a new action plan for 2024, Zelensky occasionally bypassed him in leading the armed forces, Fesenko said.

But Zaluzhny’s authority among top leaders and military officials remains sky-high.

At the beginning of 2022, when Ukrainian politicians were firmly convinced that Russian President Vladimir Putin was bluffing and would not dare to invade, Zaluzhny, who has been at the head of the armed forces since July 2021, has prepared intensively.

“There were different views in the political sphere, but the military with him at the helm made every effort to prepare and he showed success,” Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, Ukraine’s former deputy chief of general staff, told Al Jazeera.

Zaluzhny, once a little-known figure, rarely speaks to the press and avoids publicity. He is by far the most trustworthy person in Ukraine during the war.

He is more popular than Zelensky – an astronomical 88 percent of Ukrainians trust him, a recent poll showed, while 62 percent trust the president.

According to a Kyiv International Sociology Institute poll conducted in early December, 72 percent said they opposed his dismissal, while 2 percent supported it.

But popularity does not necessarily lead to political success.

Ukraine’s elites and public do not typically view the military and law enforcement agencies as a source of political and presidential material.

Ukraine’s second president, Leonid Kuchma, appointed former intelligence chief Evhen Marchuk as prime minister in 1995, but soon fired him for “trying to shape his own political image.”

Another would-be president, former Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko, died in 2005 from two shots in the head in what was officially ruled a suicide.

Former intelligence chief Ihor Smeshko and former defense minister Anatoly Hritsenko founded their own political parties but received minimal support in their attempts to run for president.

In Ukraine, the army is “not a political institution with a special development vision like in Latin America,” Kiev-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.

So if Zaluzhny decides to leave the military and turn to politics, he would be a “good sparring partner” for Zelensky, but would not be elected president, said Igar Tyshkevich of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, a think tank in Kiev.

“But it is almost certain that he will lead one of the largest factions in the Verkhovna Rada,” Tyshkevich told Al Jazeera from the lower house of the Ukrainian parliament.

He dismissed concerns that there could be protests if Zaluzhny is fired.

Media leaks have named two generals who could replace Zaluzhny.

One of them is Kyrylo Budanov, a 38-year-old who led small intelligence groups that landed in annexed Crimea before the war and now heads the Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate.

His agency sent helicopters in 2022 to help Ukrainian soldiers fighting at the besieged Azov Valley plant in Mariupol.

It carried out drone strikes on bombers, warships, air defense systems and military bases deep inside Russia and in annexed Crimea.

Budanov’s men have assassinated pro-Russian strongmen and disloyal Ukrainian politicians in separatist-controlled and Russian-occupied territories.

Another possible replacement for Zaluzhny is Oleksandr Syrsky, a seasoned military veteran who defended Kyiv and pushed Russian forces out of the eastern region in early 2022 Kharkiv later in the year.

If either follows in Zaluzhny’s footsteps, there will certainly be bitter public feelings toward Zelensky, but if an impending counteroffensive is successful, they would “dissolve within months,” Tyshkevich said.