The Dismissal of Ukraine’s Defence Minister

The removal of Ukrainian Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov sparked protests across the country. Initially presented by President Zelesnky as the result of a personal clash between Fedorov and Ukraine’s Command-in-Chief General Oleksandr Syrsky, the political crisis in fact straddles a substantive debate about the future of Ukraine’s way of war, and the character of the Ukrainian state. Fedorov’s dismissal will not settle that debate; but Ukrainian civil society might.

Reform and Force Development

When Fedorov was appointed to the Ministry of Defence in January 2026 he was far from a stranger to the issues facing Ukraine’s defenders. From his previous post as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation he had overseen Ukraine’s scaling of UAV production and employment, the use of incentive structures to prioritise targeting, and the digital networking of its forces that has underpinned Ukraine’s ability to inflict sustained and heavy losses on the Russian military. As a member of Stavka he was also acutely aware of the strain the military was under, including an inadequate conversion of recruits into infantry, the limited scale at which operations could be planned and executed and the desperate need to retain the technological edge against a larger adversary.

Fedorov therefore arrived at the defence ministry with a plan and, armed with a mandate from Parliament, set about aggressively implementing it. After an initial audit of Ukrainian unit performance, he concluded that of Ukraine’s 120 brigades, around a sixth suffered disproportionately from poor leadership, leading to sustained underperformance on the battlefield. He therefore proposed to consolidate these brigades, reallocating their personnel to the better led units that were often chronically short of manpower, rather than having to push recruits to replace losses in units whose performance was unlikely to improve.

Another challenge was troop rotation. Fedorov reasoned that if retention during training was to improve – easing the shortage of manpower – then the experience of service had to rise. While Ukraine’s Inspector General of the Armed Forces concluded that troops should be rotated in less than 40 days, Ukrainian brigade commanders lacked the assets to rotate, or the firepower to create conditions where it was safe to do so, leaving soldiers in the combat area for up to 200 days at a time. To address this, Fedorov wanted to strengthen the Army Corps, giving them a consistent set of units under command so that they could group resources and establish a rotation in their sectors. When he came into office, Ukrainian corps had their subordinate brigades distributed along the front in non-contiguous geography, massively complicating command. Fedorov wanted to collocate a corps’ constituent brigades. A further line of effort in making Ukraine’s defence more sustainable was to reduce Ukrainian casualties through technology. To do this Fedorov wanted to identify those commanders who were best leveraging technology in new ways to carry out combat tasks at a lower cost, and to empower them with people and equipment.

There was a raft of other changes to how the force was structured and fought that he wanted to pursue, but as the Ministry set about trying to implement these reforms a pattern began to emerge. The Ministry directed that brigades be consolidated: General Syrskyi proceeded to establish three additional brigades. The Ministry directed the consolidation of Ukraine’s corps. Syrskyi took several of Ukraine’s best units and deployed them as a split formation across opposite ends of the front. The point at which things became dire was when Fedorov’s team started to try and resource technically innovative units, only to find that personnel were prioritised to 425 Assault Regiment, which persisted in human centric, high casualty attacks – accused of abuse of its own personnel – while stripping away supporting equipment from commanders of innovative formations that Fedorov had wanted to enable. At the point where it became clear that Fedorov’s desire to identify competent and innovative commanders would see those very individuals disempowered by the military leadership, the rift between the Ministry and General Staff became irreconcilable.

From General Syrskyi’s point of view he was defending the integrity of the command system. What Fedorov saw as necessary reform, Syrskyi perceived as a Ministry that should be focussed on procurement making a power grab to directly command individual units in the field, bypassing the General Staff and military leadership. For Fedorov, procurement could not be so easily split off from the conduct of battle in a war where innovation was fastest at the edge. Faced with irreconcilable positions, everything began to be elevated to Zelensky. He determined that such a situation was unsustainable and so removed Fedorov.

Civilian Control

Had Zelensky also sided with Syrskyi on the substance of the arguments the move would have been unpopular yet coherent. But he did not. Fedorov had been voted in as Minister with a mandate to implement reforms and Zelensky was clear that the reforms should be continued by his successor. The most significant and contentious reform was of Ukraine’s conscription system.

At present Ukrainian men are liable to be conscripted directly by the military. Units of the Ground Forces are tasked with finding recruits against a quota and detaining them. It is a deeply unpopular system, leaving men across Ukraine with no certainty or ability to plan for their family. And the process leads to poor results. Ukrainian frontline units remain short of manpower, despite an adequate recruitment base in the population.

When Fedorov looked at the recruitment problem, however, he noted that while significant improvements could be made to how people were mobilised – ideally with notification in advance to settle their affairs, conscription for defined and limited period, and with enforcement if they evaded the draft – the existing system was bringing in more than enough people from the street. The problem was that training, personnel management, and corruption was seeing only a minority of those mobilised reach combat units each month. Fixing mobilisation, therefore, which he had been directed to do by the Parliament and the President, could only be achieved by making changes to how the force handled and trained recruits. In this context, Syrskyi’s refusal to work with the Ministry to change how the force was managed would make the reform of conscription fail.

This dynamic shifts the entire context of the disagreement from one of personality and policy to a question of principle. If the aim of the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 was to empower democracy and chart a course towards European integration, civilian control of the military is an important measure of Ukraine’s progress. For the military to defy policy direction from a Minister appointed by the President and Parliament to implement a reform agenda therefore brought into question the premise of Ukraine’s war effort and resistance. The fear for many Ukrainians was that while rhetorically, Fedorov’s successor would speak of reform, if he tried to implement it, he would run into the same clash with Syrskyi, and if he did not then the military would be dictating policy to the civilian leadership. This is why protests that began in defence of Fedorov have rapidly turned to a demand for Syrskyi’s removal, because Ukrainian society can see from Fedorov’s record that the system can be improved.

The tragedy of this process is that it has unfolded just as Ukraine has put Russia under immense pressure tactically and thereby bought the opportunity to further gain the upper hand. It has also paralysed progress in bolstering Ukraine’s defences in the lead up to what is likely to be a harsh winter and a potential Russian mobilisation. For Ukraine’s civil society, having glimpsed the prospect of a successful conclusion of the war, the fear that Ukraine’s hopes may be smothered by elite squabbling is an unacceptable outcome. And so once again it is civil society – as in 2014 and 2022 – that must save Ukraine from itself.

© RUSI, 2026.

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