Over the past week, in Ukraine, we have witnessed something that is, to say the least, unusual for a modern country under martial law.

It all began on 15 July, when President Zelensky announced an imminent government reshuffle. Rumours immediately began to circulate about the possible dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, just six months into his term.

We will explain who Fedorov is in a moment: for now, suffice it to say that public opinion has interpreted this move as an act of revenge by a section of the military establishment, certain politiciansand businesspeople involved in supplying the army, and above all by the elderly Chief of the General Staff, Oleksandr Syrsky, whose interests the 35-year-old minister is said to have stepped on or whose business dealings he is alleged to have undermined.

Thus, in Kyiv and other urban centres, the squares filled with demonstrators – unorganised and carrying homemade placards – urging Zelensky to reconsider his decision on Fedorov and, whilst he was at it, to remove Syrsky from command of the armed forces.

This was followed by days of media drama, during which the president contacted – and at times consulted in public – the commanders of various units, weighing up (or pretending to weigh up) a way out that would best meet the needs of those on the front line.

Finally, last night, the announcement came: Fedorov will be sacked – ‘promoveatur ut removeatur’ – but Syrsky will also be sacked, to make way for a charismatic, respected officer with a modern approach such as Mykhailo Drapaty.

A bit of a catch-two-ways situation.

Fedorov and supplies

One thing is certain: very few people in Ukraine believe that Fedorov’s forced resignation was down to ego or rivalry.
The issues at stake are very concrete and are those on which the survival of the country under attack depends: supplies to military units and the mobilisation of new soldiers.

Fedorov was no newcomer. Between the ages of 28 and 34, he had served as Minister for Digital Transformation, and it is to his credit that the Ukrainian state is still able to provide services despite the relentless bombardment of power stations and infrastructure.

In claiming credit for his achievements, he has also taken credit for the creation of the Delta system, the first multi-domain command and control software ever made available to an army.
The initial campaigns to procure and develop drones in 2022 – when the conflict was still dominated by artillery, rocket launchers and mortars – owe a great deal to him ( the ‘Army of Drones’ campaign was particularly famous , with the lead actor from *Star Wars* among those taking part).
Finally, it was he who personally rang Elon Musk in 2022 to secure Starlink terminals for the Ukrainians, and again in 2025 to have the Russians shut them down.

When he was subsequently appointed Minister of Defence, his motto was ‘War as a data platform’.
In fact, he did not merely passively supply military units with weapons or components: he sought to impose the managerial method of ‘continuous improvement’, selecting and replicating on a larger scale whatever yielded the most significant results.
 
This applied to strategies (such as deep-penetration drone strikes to wear down the Russian economy), it applied to equipment (such as ground robots for rescuing soldiers, which carried out almost 17,000 missions in June alone) but, above all, it applied to the brigades on the front line: those that performed best – that is, eliminated the most invaders – received new weapons of the same type, in a macabre but effective ‘quality circle’.

In short, Fedorov had everything it took to win over Westerners and the younger, more educated and urban sections of the local public.

But in reality, rather than being a defence minister, he had turned himself into a minister of war: he was not only ensuring supplies for the army, but was also imposing objectives and strategies on it. All this whilst ignoring the obvious problem: the chronic shortage of men to send to the front.

Syrsky and mobilisation

A shortfall which, however, had been at the top of Syrsky’s list of concerns.
A general from a bygone era, responsible on the ground for the two most brilliant victories of 2022 (the defence of Kyiv and the counter-offensive in Kharkiv), accustomed to visiting the front line to gauge the true state of affairs, and convinced that without continuous recruitment at any cost, that front would eventually collapse.

Anyone who regards Syrsky merely as a relic of the Soviet era is, in fact, very much mistaken.
He had also trained at Western academies, adopted a supply model devised in Denmark (involving a direct partnership between military units and suppliers), and, all things considered, in three years, had limited the advance of the world’s second-largest army to the distance a Panda can cover in half an hour.

The only ‘Soviet’ thing about him was his tendency to care far too little about human casualties and to favour friends of friends – though this is by no means a Soviet exclusive (one need only think of the American war in Vietnam).

The point, however, is that Ukraine is neither the USSR nor the USA: it has a pool of potential soldiers that is dwindling by the day, and with every new case of abuse against conscripts, those few potential soldiers become even more disillusioned and seek ways to evade service.

The dilemma facing Drapaty will not disappear with Syrsky: either he gives the recruitment offices free rein, risking further abuse, or he restricts their scope of action to prevent further abuse. In either case, the number of draft dodgers will rise.

What is a “mob” in Ukraine?

That is why a few thousand protesters – who would be ignored in any big Western country – are actually able to influence presidential decisions in Ukraine.
Statistically, out of every thousand demonstrators, a few dozen are veterans, hundreds are potential recruits, and all the rest have at least one loved one at the front.

When there is a chronic shortage of men, no civilian is just an ordinary person: the reaction to a small demonstration represents the reaction to the needs of hundreds of thousands of people already in the armed forces and of just as many hundreds of thousands who will one day end up there.
Every misstep by Zelensky could have explosive consequences and undermine social order.

As military and state secrecy laws are in force, no one knows whether Syrsky’s supporters were right in claiming that Fedorov’s corporate and futuristic approach had caused avoidable deaths, or whether Fedorov’s supporters were right in renewing the accusation against Syrsky. The fact remains that civil society has sided with Fedorov.
And today’s civil society in Ukraine is tomorrow’s army.

Conspiracy theories about Zelensky

There are, of course, those who have claimed that the former comedian got rid of Fedorov because he saw him as a potential rival.
But this theory does not hold water: by turning him into a martyr, in fact, Zelensky has handed him a future political career on a plate.

There are, therefore, those who suppose the exact opposite: the move was intended to groom a ‘heir apparent’, a successor who, after Zelensky’s departure from the political scene, would enjoy enormous popularity (as well as the personal friendship of the CEOs of Palantir and SpaceX).
Fedorov would thus have been removed from his post just in time to avoid bearing the inevitable blame for the mobilisation, which is going from bad to worse, whilst at the same time seizing the opportunity to strike a blow against Syrsky under the pretext of public outrage.

After all, when Zelensky wants to make a controversial move, he must always act with the utmost caution and, if possible, delegate the responsibility.

But he no longer has any scapegoats, such as his right-hand man Andriy Yermak, whom he sacrificed a year ago in the name of the fight against corruption. And at the same time, he no longer has any rabbits left to pull out of his hat to improve his image, as he had done with Fedorov himself six months ago.
Taking on Syrsky head-on would have been complicated for him. After these turbulent six days, however, it has been much less so.