On the face of it, Volodymyr Zelensky’s firing last week of his popular 35-year-old Defence Minister Mikhailo Fyodorov was an inexplicable own-goal. As Minister for Digital Transformation, Fedorov led Ukraine’s push towards massive drone production. As Defence Minister since January 2026, he was widely credited for Ukraine’s turning the tables on Russia with long-range drone strikes and for cutting corruption in the military. When news that Fyodorov was to be fired broke, thousands of young protesters took to the streets in Kyiv denouncing Zelensky.
The most important question is how Fyodorov’s sacking will impact the outcome of the war
Why Zelensky fired Fyodorov is a tale of infighting between the minister and chief of the general staff Oleksandr Syrskyi. By Fyodorov’s account, the disagreement was over corrupt military procurement and Syrskyi’s supposedly Soviet-style fighting doctrine that needlessly sacrificed lives. But the bigger and more important question is what the row tells us about how Ukraine is run – and how Zelensky maintains power after seven years in office and five years at war.
According to former senior members of Zelensky’s administration, the Ukrainian state operates like a three-ring circus. The outer ring is performative, designed to ‘tick the boxes of Western socio-political sensibilities’, writes political analyst Aleksandar Djokic, and is populated by characters such as ‘the feminist girl boss, the modern tech bro, the sweet-talking young minister with UwU stickers on her laptop’.
The second ring is for the benefit of Ukrainian voters. ‘You can call it the dream factory,’ says a former senior minister and one-time Zelensky loyalist. This level is where an extensive machinery of loyal politicians, journalists and bloggers ‘talk bluntly and aggressively about recovering our lost lands, how we’re going to screw Putin and kill the barbarian Russians’.
But the innermost ring where the real decisions are made is composed of Zelensky loyalists and powerful vested interests. Zelensky ‘understands and trusts his own team only’, says a former member of Zelensky’s government who has known him for 15 years. ‘These are the people whose interests he will protect first and foremost.’
When those loyalists and interests came under attack last summer from Ukraine’s independent, Western-backed anticorruption bodies SAPO and NABU, Zelensky reacted by attempting to bring them under the control of the Presidential Administration. The first mass protests of the war were the result – and further NABU investigations have revealed massive embezzlement schemes run by some of Zelensky’s oldest and closest associates. Zelensky’s all-powerful chief of staff and ‘green cardinal’ Andriy Yermak was sacked, then arrested.
Over recent months and years, Zelensky has also become increasingly reliant on a base of support among the ultranationalists who dominate Ukraine’s military, many of them veterans of the Azov volunteer regiment raised in Mariupol in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Azov – whose symbol is the Wolfsangel used by the notorious 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ and the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division – has now expanded to a whole army Corps. Back in October 2019, then-Azov commander Andriy Biletsky, a white supremacist who had formerly led Ukraine’s Social-National Assembly, threatened to mobilise veterans to overthrow Zelensky if he continued to pursue plans to hold a referendum in the self-declared breakaway republics of Donbas. But today Biletsky commands the 3rd Army Corps and has been spoken of as a future chief of the general staff.
In order to please army ultranationalists like Biletsky, Zelensky earlier this year blew up Ukraine’s crucial relationship with Poland, one of its closest and most generous allies in Europe. Zelensky personally attended the reburial, with full military honours, of Andriy Melnyk – a leader of the second world war-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA, which in addition to fighting Soviet troops also massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish civilians. To add insult to injury, Zelensky also named a Ukrainian military unit after the ‘Heroes of the UPA’, prompting Poland’s president to withdraw the Order of the White Eagle, his country’s highest decoration, from Zelensky. The UPA row collapsed Polish support in the EU for more funding and eventual membership for Kyiv, and led to a shutdown of military supplies.
Zelensky’s firing of Fyodorov is the latest example of the pattern of backing his core supporters over wider strategic considerations. Fyodorov was popular with Western politicians and donors, the drone warfare successes which he was credited for made him a key part of the ‘Ukraine is winning’ narrative – and last but not least his young can-do internet generation attitude was popular among young, techno-savvy voters. Yet ultimately, Zelensky chose to support the military establishment over the boat-rocking firebrand just as Washington is beginning to adopt a more positive attitude toward Ukraine. For Zelensky, when push comes to shove, the support of the military establishment and the big hitters of the militech-industrial complex, plus protecting his old friends, matter more than Western partners or Kyiv’s middle classes.
‘We were sold a fully manufactured image of Zelensky as an incorruptible wartime leader,’ says Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary. But ‘each new minister arrives as a supposed saviour and departs as another disappointment…The question is how many more golden calves must be paraded and discarded before the country confronts the person who sits at the centre of the system and benefits from its continued opacity.’
According to former senior members of Zelensky’s administration, the Ukrainian state operates like a three-ring circus
The idea that Fyodorov is a plucky young upstart challenging the establishment doesn’t really fit with his seven years’ service as an ultra-loyal minister in Zelensky’s cabinet. At the same time, it’s also clear that Fyodorov stepped on the toes of many powerful interest groups in his quest to streamline the notoriously corrupt area of defence procurement. Instead of expensive big-ticket items on the army’s shopping list, Fyodorov purchased what front line brigades were actually asking for, such as pickup trucks and drones.
Fyodorov also attacked Syrskyi’s supposedly initiative-killing approach to the organisation of the army, ordered a civilian security service investigation into beatings, abuse and 26 reported murders in Syrsky’s favoured Skelia unit, and finally slammed the army chief for fighting with manpower as opposed to drones and unmanned vehicles.
‘Drone-assault units are a fundamental change in the way we think about deploying infantry,’ said Fedorov in a blistering post-sacking speech. ‘Technology must be at the forefront of combat. We should lose drones, not people, and only then should infantry move in.’
The most important question is how Fyodorov’s sacking will impact the outcome of the war. The narrative that Ukraine is now winning thanks to its long-range strikes is, in part, a carefully constructed PR story put together for the Nato summit in Ankara where crucial funding packages were decided. That’s not to say that Ukrainian deep strikes aren’t doing real damage. Dozens of Russian oil refineries have been set ablaze and last week two giant warehouses belonging to Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon, were destroyed. Equally real are the massive gasoline lines in almost every Russian province, the effective blockade of the Crimean peninsula and the sunken tankers in the sea of Azov who tried to break it.
The narrative of Ukrainian victory leaves out half the scorecard
But the narrative of Ukrainian victory leaves out half the scorecard. On the ground, Russian troops have reached the centre of Konstantynovka, one of the three remaining ‘fortress cities’ of the Donbas. Reports suggest that Kyiv’s strikes have damaged, not destroyed Russia’s refineries – capacity has gone down by only 13.5 per cent. That’s painful, but by no means catastrophic. And in recent weeks a chronic shortage of US-made Patriot interceptors has left Kyiv and other cities wide open to attack by Russian ballistic missiles, which have destroyed an underground metro station and are systematically taking out hundreds of petrol stations. At the Nato summit the US offered Ukraine (and France) a licence to produce their own Patriots – but that won’t become a reality for at least two years. As Ukraine’s military chief Syrskyi said, the long-range strikes are ‘reciprocal’, with Ukraine being hit every bit as hard as it is able to hit back.
Fyodorov understood that modern war runs on tech integration, not Soviet-era hierarchy, yet was fired for pursuing reforms too aggressively. With Vladimir Putin showing no signs of backing down – indeed, many well-sourced recent reports suggest that he instead wants to escalate – Ukraine needs to come up with a comprehensive strategy to make continuing the war too painful for Russia to bear.
Ukraine has achieved a military miracle in fighting its much larger and far more powerful neighbour to a standstill, and even reaching military parity. But in a long war of attrition, it’s Russia with its advantages of size, economic heft and population, that holds the upper hand. Young, smart, tech-minded people like Fyodorov hold the secret to tipping that balance. And a Ukrainian leader forced on victory rather than survival would do well to place their bets on leaders of the future, not men of the past.
