How rivalry with a top general brought down Ukraine’s popular defence minister Fedorov

It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that a defence minister wouldn’t go down without a fight.

As thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets across the country on Thursday to protest President Volodymyr Zelensky’s abrupt – and largely unexplained – decision not to reappoint popular defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov in a sweeping government overhaul, the man himself held a press conference in Kyiv to launch an unusually public attack against the person he held responsible for his forced resignation: Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Standing in front of a slick black slide deck showing Ukrainian drones sweeping across the battlefield, the 35-year-old Fedorov told reporters that the nation’s top general had been systematically thwarting his efforts to implement much-needed reforms within the armed forces.

"Instead of figuring out how to defeat Russia asymmetrically – which is the commander-in-chief's task – he figured out how to split the country," he said, dressed in his trademark tech-bro T-shirt and jeans.

"In this configuration, I personally don't know how to win the war."

'Thousands of people are still dying over a few meters of ground' in Ukraine

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Fedorov admitted that he urged Zelensky to replace Syrsky as head of the nation’s armed forces, as well as Chief of the General Staff Andrii Hnatov. While he said he had been prepared to continue working with both men once it became clear that Zelensky would keep them on, he accused Syrsky of issuing his own ultimatum: either Fedorov went, or he did.

Zelensky appears to have made his choice. Fedorov had been in his post for just six months.

Competing visions

Speaking to reporters, the Ukrainian president said that the two men had barely been able to be in the same room together.

"A president in wartime should not have to choose in such a situation, honestly," he said. He insisted that Fedorov, who earlier said he had rejected an offer by the president to stay on in an advisory role, would remain part of his team.

Lesia Bidochko, a senior lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said the rift between the two men lay bare a fundamental disagreement on how to continue the fight against Russia as Moscow’s invasion grinds into its fifth year.

“It’s a broader tension over how to manage a prolonged war,” she said. “As a commander-in-chief and four-star general, Syrsky approaches the problem through the lens of operational command and battlefield realities, where immediate military requirements, force generation and combat effectiveness take priority.”

“Fedorov, an effective and highly modern manager, seemed to treat many military challenges as organisational and managerial problems that could be solved by changing incentives and accelerating decision-making,” she said.

“He focused on procurement reform, defence innovation and digitalisation.”

Among his supporters, Fedorov has become almost synonymous with Ukraine’s successful embrace of rapidly evolving drone warfare to hold back the much larger Russian military.

Long a close ally of the president's – dating back to when Zelensky was a popular TV comedian – Fedorov was a 28-year-old marketing specialist when he oversaw a successful 2019 social media blitz that helped Zelensky win the presidency. Zelensky named him digital transformation minister upon taking office.

During his time at the new ministry, the ambitious tech enthusiast led the overhaul of Ukraine’s ageing bureaucracy with the rollout of a smartphone app that allowed people to more easily access essential state services. He became an ardent advocate of drone procurement and production, and forged close relationships with US tech magnates including SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Palantir’s Alex Karp.

Maria Engqvist, an analyst and director of the Swedish Defence Research Agency’s Russia and Eurasia Studies Programme, said that Fedorov fought to bring that same modernising fervour to the armed forces when he was named defence minister in January.

“His transition to the military realm as minister of defence faced some initial critique, since his visions of transformation relied heavily on drone and cyber warfare – partially as an answer to manpower shortages, and the question of Ukraine’s allegedly critical demographic situation.”

But she said that Fedorov’s single-minded focus on digital dominance has not always been well-received by the embattled nation’s top brass.

“The problem is that drones and code cannot regain and control physical territory, which to my understanding remains a strategic priority for the Ukrainian leadership,” Engqvist said. “This requires manpower and munitions – which are both in shortage.”

Syrsky cuts a very different figure. Born in Russia before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 60-year-old trained at the Moscow Higher Military Command School before going on to serve in the Soviet Artillery Corps.

His critics have accused him of remaining too attached to that era’s heavily centralised command structures, and of pursuing tactical gains at the high cost of soldiers' lives.

Syrsky’s overseeing of the bloody nine-month defence of Bakhmut, where both sides suffered devastating losses before Kyiv was forced to abandoned the ravaged city, earned him the nickname “the Butcher”.

Watch moreExclusive: Ukraine prepares counter-offensive on the front line near Bakhmut

Nonetheless, the experienced general played a crucial role in coordinating the desperate defence of Kyiv in the first days of the full-scale Russian onslaught in 2022, and in driving Moscow's forces out of much of Kharkiv oblast later in the year.

Bidochko said that Fedorov had also proved something of a divisive figure within the rank and file.

“Within the military, attitudes were also mixed,” she said. “Innovative units welcomed faster procurement and greater attention to technology, while some others remained sceptical of approaches they felt underestimated the realities of frontline command and manpower.”

While Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on oil refineries and other energy infrastructure deep within Russia’s territory have caused widespread fuel shortages across the country, Kyiv’s chronic manpower shortage remains an urgent problem on this side of the front.

On being named in January, Fedorov became the first defence minister to reveal Ukraine’s growing desertion crisis, announcing that more than 200,000 people were absent without leave. Another 2 million men were believed to be actively evading the military draft.

Ukraine’s mandatory conscription for men between the ages of 25 and 60 remains deeply unpopular, with draft officers increasingly accused of violently dragging military-age men off the street to be sent to the front.

Last week, hundreds of people in the western city of Lviv set upon draft officers while they were trying to detain a pair of men, overturning their army vehicle and stripping the uniforms off their backs. More than 100 violent clashes between draft officers and members of the public were recorded in 2026 alone.

Read moreWhat the Lviv draft riot tells us about Ukraine’s struggle to send men to fight

Fedorov announced long-awaited recruitment reforms in June, promising pay rises, fixed-term contracts and more aggressive recruitment of foreign fighters to fill the ranks. He also suggested that the country’s longest-serving soldiers could be discharged before the end of the year.

But Zelensky reportedly told lawmakers from his Servant of the People party that Fedorov’s reforms had been more style than substance, accusing the defence minister of not having been up to the task.

“Fedorov did only an imitation of reforms, just slides,” a ruling party lawmaker told Politico on condition of anonymity.

But Engqvist said that this was not a problem that could be solved within a few brief months.

“Any Ukrainian minister of defence who gets this task to solve is bound to hit a brick wall sooner or later because of the political sensitivity of this issue, regardless of who occupies the post,” she said.

For Bidochko, though, mobilising men to fight on the front lines goes beyond promising institutional change.

“Fedorov argued the military itself had to become more technologically advanced and professionally attractive so that more people would choose to serve voluntarily. Fair enough,” she said. “But this argument also has limits. Even the best-managed military cannot remove the central dilemma of a high-intensity war – Ukraine still needs large numbers of people willing to fight. Let’s not forget that Russia is expected to officially announce a new wave of mass mobilisation in autumn 2026, right after the State Duma elections. Technology can reduce casualties, it can increase efficiency, but can’t fully replace infantry, engineers, logistics units, etcetera.”

Ultimately, she said, the argument rested on what she said was something of a false choice – whether men or machines should bear the brunt of a relentless war of attrition.

“The mobilisation discussion reflects two competing visions of the war,” she said. “One places greater emphasis on expanding manpower – the other seeks to reduce dependence on manpower through technology, drones, automation and better resource management. In reality, Ukraine needs both.”