KYIV — From the outside, this was shaping up as a strong year for wartime Ukraine.
Ukrainian drones are burning Russia’s refineries and starving occupied Crimea of fuel. Moscow’s summer offensive has stalled on most parts of the front, and Ukraine is taking back territory. In Washington, a president who spent last year berating Kyiv has warmed to it again.
But suddenly last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky dismantled what looked like a winning team — removing his popular defense minister, his prime minister and, late Tuesday, the acclaimed commander in chief of his armed forces.
Zelensky, the comedian turned president who has won worldwide renown as a wartime leader but also been shadowed by corruption scandals, has explained little beyond announcing a reshuffling of Ukraine’s “political strategy.”
That didn’t satisfy Ukrainians — averse to any whiff of public malfeasance — who poured into the streets to protest, in particular, the removal of Mykhailo Fedorov, revered by many as a key architect of Ukraine’s breakthrough advances in drone warfare.
The tumult has left analysts sifting through why-now theories of the internal machinations erupting just as Ukraine was gaining ground on Russia. The possible explanations include a generational fight over how to wage a modern war, conflicts over corruption, simmering turf battles between the Defense Ministry and the generals, and a president who is prone to removing subordinates when they grow too popular.
Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, Zelensky is facing a crisis he plainly did not expect. He is scrambling to contain the fallout at home and keep it from roiling Ukraine’s critical relationships, including with the White House and NATO headquarters.
At the least, the blowup reveals deep institutional tensions in Ukraine’s command structures that have been brewing for months, according to Mykola Bielieskov, a defense analyst in Kyiv. Old-guard battlefield tacticians were not always on board with the disruptor-style hacks championed by younger officials, Fedorov chief among them. Many NATO officials were fans of Fedorov’s innovative approach and told reporters privately that they were disappointed in Zelensky’s move against him.
“Probably [Zelensky] didn’t grasp fully how Fedorov has become so closely associated with positive changes,” Bielieskov said. “And the overall protest morphed into broad debate on war strategy and battlefield management.”
It was a noisy debate. Thousands gathered outside the president’s office in Kyiv on five consecutive nights after Fedorov was sacked, with rallies in more than a dozen other cities.
If it was strictly a generational clash, the younger generation may be coming out on top after all. After days of protests, Zelensky reversed again, firing the top military leader known to have tussled with Fedorov, Ukraine’s commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrsky; replaced him with another reform-minded commander; and offered Fedorov a new high-level role in government.
Syrsky came to lead Ukraine’s military two years ago as the controversial replacement of the popular head of the armed forces at the time, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.
Zelensky and Zaluzhny clashed repeatedly over a number of military issues, including a request by Zaluzhny to mobilize about 500,000 new soldiers. But reports of Zaluzhny’s political ambitions, possibly with an eye on the presidency, further soured their relationship, media reports said.
Zaluzhny became Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain: a position geographically and politically removed from Kyiv but still prominent enough to silence critics of his dismissal.
The recent fight may have broken into the open now in part because the drone tactics were working so well, experts said. The people who believed drones and robots would win this war saw them gain ground against Russia, felt vindicated and grew louder. The people who believe wars are still won by infantry and artillery pushed back.
That argument had a face on each side. Fedorov — 35, who owned a social media marketing company and built Ukraine’s government smartphone app before he was handed the Defense Ministry — advocated for drones, robots and data.
On the other side was Syrsky, 60, the commanding general, who was born in Russia and trained at a Moscow military academy. He built his career on infantry and artillery and was credited with the masterful defense of Kyiv when Russian tanks and Howitzers were advancing in the early weeks of the war. But war fighting has evolved by generations in the four years since, with Ukraine’s more innovative commanders leading the way.
The turbulence has exposed a duality within Ukraine’s armed forces — a military widely seen as a model of agility and innovation has also struggled to overcome corruption, turf wars and disagreements over strategic vision.
In a news conference after his removal, Fedorov described a remarkable degree of dysfunction for a military that has essentially fought Russia to a standstill: damaging leadership churn in fighting units, chaotic reconfigurations of brigades and battalions, and bureaucratic impediments to getting military hardware — including the latest drones — to troops that most need them.
“We simply won’t be able to carry out the same number of mobilizations as the Russians do,” Fedorov said. “In reality, we have no other choice if we want to defeat the enemy asymmetrically, with minimal losses — where strong leaders and commanders can develop and are not suppressed, sidelined, dismissed, reprimanded or otherwise stifled.”
But other factors are likely also in play in Zelensky’s shake-up, analysts said, including Fedorov’s emerging role as an anti-corruption force inside the military. He had nudged defense contracts into open bidding and ordered audits of who was being paid what. In a country where reports of corruption in weapons procurement has been a scandal for years, that made him popular with the public and dangerous to many suppliers.
Ukrainian reporters say that dozens of arms-industry interests were being squeezed out of the budget and that they had reason to want him gone.
The third theory is the simplest and the least flattering to Zelensky. Fedorov had become one of the most trusted public figures in the country. Elections are suspended under martial law, but they will eventually come, and Zelensky has been in office for seven years.
Protesters this week made the comparison with Zaluzhny themselves.
Zelensky’s reasons for the shake-up seem to have been driven by a mix of generational faction fighting, corruption currents and egos, said a European diplomat in Kyiv. But also raw politics.
“All three of those reasons are true,” said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive views. “But also, Fedorov is a political threat to Zelensky; many groups wanted to take him down.”
The timing of the uproar worries Ukraine’s friends. Kyiv has only just steadied its relationship with President Donald Trump after a year of insults and interrupted weapons shipments with a promise this month that Ukraine can manufacture its own interceptor missiles, one of the most valuable things Zelensky has extracted from the White House.
A country in visible political disarray is a harder country to keep arming. Russian drones and missiles keep landing.
Hendrix reported from London. Anastacia Galouchka and Serhiy Morgunov in Kyiv and Greg Miller in London contributed to this report.
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