Drone warfare took a while to catch on in Ukraine. Like any revolution, it required a struggle. The opposition came mostly from the older generals trained to fight using artillery and tanks. Early in the war with Russia, many of them saw drones as toys, better suited to taking aerial photos of wedding parties than flying missions over the battlefield. But a coalition of junior officers and tech enthusiasts saw early on that drones could hold the key to Ukraine’s defense, even its victory.
The course of the war has proved the younger generation right. Drones now account for more than 80 percent of all battlefield casualties. They have made tanks and artillery look like lumbering relics in the war zone. Through long-range strikes against Russian oil refineries and other infrastructure, drones have also forced Moscow to play defense. But it took years for the technology to gain broad acceptance.
“We had no financing at first,” Mykhailo Fedorov, the main proponent of drone warfare in Ukraine, told me in an interview last year. The first attack-drone units formed in Ukraine in 2023, about a year into the full-scale war with Russia. “We were going around, asking for money from businesspeople, fundraising on Facebook,” he said.
At the time, Fedorov served as the minister of digital transformation, a position that gave him no power to buy weapons on the state’s behalf. Through persistence, showmanship, and a knack for technocratic knife-fighting, he circumvented the rules of military procurement, turning his ministry into a hub for Ukraine’s nascent drone program. “The revolution happened inside the bureaucracy,” he told me.
So did the counterrevolution. Its leaders sat a couple of miles away, behind the neoclassical facade of the General Staff headquarters. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, was chief among them. He trained in the Soviet school of military theory and often clashed with Fedorov over the role that drones should play in the Ukrainian arsenal. Their conflict intensified at the start of this year, when Fedorov took over the Ministry of Defense, a post that finally gave him control over the purchase of weapons.
[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]
Over the past six months, Fedorov and Syrsky frequently took their complaints about each other to the arbiter in their disagreements, President Volodymyr Zelensky. This month, their constant infighting became too much for the president, and he decided to fire first Fedorov, and then Syrsky. But he did not resolve the questions at the center of their conflict. Should Ukraine, in the middle of a war for its survival, continue to restructure the machinery of its defense in ways that no military power has ever attempted? Or would that strategy end up weakening the forces tasked with holding the line against Russia?
Ukraine’s war effort now faces a leadership vacuum, and neither camp has a clear mandate to complete Ukraine’s history-making experiment in warfare or to reverse it. The drone revolution, having already reached a point of no return, has now lost its greatest advocate in the top ranks of the government. The result could be a level of indecision that the military cannot afford.
On Monday, the day before he was fired, General Syrsky issued a call for the tech accelerationists inside the government to pump the brakes. Drones alone cannot defeat the Russian army, and the culture of Silicon Valley cannot supplant the need for military discipline, Syrsky argued in a column for Militarnyi, a Ukrainian publication focused on defense. “It is an obvious gamble,” he wrote, addressing the push for Ukraine to outsource the work of soldiers to artificially intelligent machines. “Any experiment of this scale is paid for by our lands and our people.”
Some parts of the piece reminded me of an old man shaking his fist at a passing drone, frustrated that the world he knows is moving on. But Syrsky, who is 60 years old, made a lot of cogent points that I have often heard from senior officers. In any war, the top generals need to synchronize the forces under their command to make them function as a single organism, with weapons and tactics that work in concert with one another. The nature of the war in Ukraine has made that challenge particularly daunting.
The front line spans more than 600 miles, and its Ukrainian defenders include a dizzying array of units from various branches of the military. Early in the war, many of them got into the habit of raising money to purchase weapons and gear for themselves. Crowdfunding campaigns on social media brought in enormous sums from around the world, and much of it went toward the purchase of drones on the open market.
[Anne Applebaum: The other Ukrainian army]
The practice spawned a parallel system of procurement in the military, whereby low-level commanders routinely placed orders from the suppliers of their choice. Fedorov championed this practice. From his post in the ministry of digital transformation, he launched an online bazaar akin to Amazon that sells drones and other high-tech weapons to the military. Soldiers of any rank can scroll through thousands of gadgets on the Brave1 marketplace, including wheeled robots, remote-controlled bomber drones, and microchips to upgrade them with AI-powered targeting and other capabilities.
The market has no precedent in modern warfare. By law, the armed forces of Ukraine, like every major military in the world, centralizes weapons orders via the defense ministry. Fedorov saw that system as far too cumbersome and prone to corruption. It could not deliver weapons fast enough, he argued, and it did not cater to the ever-changing requirements of soldiers at the front. In January, when Zelensky promoted him to defense minister, Fedorov tried to supplant the traditional procurement system with a version of the marketplace.
Syrsky saw that as a threat to his authority, and it’s hard to blame him. When junior officers can decide how to equip their men, keeping everything in sync across the battlefield becomes more difficult. The lower ranks might appreciate the freedom and adaptability of this arrangement, but their commanding officers in Kyiv do not. “The General Staff provides the ministry with a complete list of what is needed for war,” Syrsky wrote in his Militarnyi column, listing artillery, mortars and “dozens of other items.” He added: “Everything must be purchased, not just what is currently in vogue.”
By the time Fedorov lost his job last week, his years of advocacy for high-tech warfare had been vindicated. Ukraine now produces several million drones a year, easing its dependence on foreign military aid. Most of the credit for that belongs to the intricate clockwork of drone factories, start-ups, software developers, training academies, and military innovators that help keep the Ukrainian war machine running. Fedorov, who is 35 years old, has long been the face of this ecosystem and its chief advocate inside the halls of power. It should therefore not have surprised Zelensky that firing Fedorov caused a fierce public backlash. Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine to demand his reinstatement. Many of the protesters called for Syrsky to be ousted instead.
The president obliged by firing the general, but he did not bring back the minister of defense. As a consolation, he offered Fedorov a position on the National Security and Defense Council, an advisory body that usually acts as a retirement home for senior officials and military brass. Fedorov declined, in part because the council has no authority to purchase weapons. Nor can it enact the ambitious reforms Fedorov left unfinished.
[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]
In place of these two seasoned members of Zelensky’s team, the president installed a pair of lesser-known figures. Although both are experienced and well regarded in the military, they lack the institutional chops and perhaps also the inclination to carry on the bureaucratic battles that felled their predecessors.
The most obvious quality they have in common might be their youth. The new acting minister of defense, Yevhenii Khmara, and the new commander of the armed forces, Mykhailo Drapatyi, both belong to the same generation as Fedorov and Zelensky. They never studied in the Soviet academies where Syrsky learned the military doctrines he has relied on throughout this war.
But that does not mean the younger generation has won a mandate to continue Fedorov’s more radical agenda. Zelensky has not granted it. His new appointees will likely face the same resistance from the older cadres in the general staff. Without Fedorov in charge of the ministry of defense, Ukraine’s revolution in warfare will lose its standard-bearer and a lot of its momentum—just when those innovations appeared to be paying off.
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