Lawfare Daily: Inside Zelensky’s Disastrous Decision to Fire Ukraine’s Minister of Defense

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well and pushing out the guy who was making all these changes was what caused this feeling of outrage and betrayal, not only among civil society, among civilian thought leaders, but among the military as well. It's the law fair podcast. I'm Anastasia Lapatina, Ukraine Fellow, at law fair, with Francis Farrell, a frontline reporter

at the Cuban dependent.

“We've seen some of the generals that he's been interviewing, speaking to, that have been reported”

to be on the very short list of the candidates to replace Sirsky, some of these are known as being loyal to Sirsky. Francis and I discussed President Zelensky's decision to replace Ukraine's Minister of Defense, while it caused mass protests across the country, and how this decision will impact the course of the war.

Francis and I reported this conversation on Tuesday, July 21st, just hours before news broke

that Zelensky finally agreed to replace the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces

General Sirsky, the fate of the Hylofetrov, the former Defense Minister, remains unclear. So this story began on July 12th when Zelensky announced, on a Sunday, that Ukraine will be changing its political strategy, and as part of that, we're shuffling its cabinet, starting from the dismissal of the Prime Minister Yulia Svertadenko, and under Ukrainian law, the removal of the PM means that they were a dissolution of the entire government.

And when this happens, the parliament basically has to re-appoint every single Cabinet member every minister again. And pretty quickly, after that announcement, the Ukrainian media, including the Commander-in-Bentant, which is where you work, began reporting that Zelensky intended to replace Ukraine's Minister of Defense, Mahayla Fedrov, meaning that he wouldn't be re-appointed, wouldn't be put forward

for any appointment, which shocked the civil society, the media, and the export community. There was a lot of chatter, including an hour sort of journalists and circles, because Fedrov is one of the most popular figures in Ukraine, and he was broadly seen as doing a great job as Minister of Defense. So then, as this chatter continued, three days later, on July 15th, Fedrov confirmed

his dismissal, he published a long statement, sort of, going through all of his successes at the job and some of the failures. And that confirmation caused such a firestorm or reactions that the next morning, at 90, I'm on a work day, a huge crowd of Ukrainians gathered near the President's office for a protest, demanding that the Federal of Bureen stated.

And I was there that morning, a lot of your colleagues were there that morning. And I want to just pause here and ask you, Francis, how did you react to that initial chatter about the Fedrov potentially being replaced? And were you surprised that this caused such a huge public reaction? Yeah, I mean, it's been in a crazy, a crazy week.

“I remember I think just two days before the decision was actually made, I was talking to one”

of my editors, and she was saying that I was asking how are you, and I was on vacation at the time, and she was saying that she was just knocked off her feet in a really bad

mood, because she should started hearing the first rumours that Fedrov would be dismissed.

And I think that already gives you a little bit of an idea of what this means to Ukrainians. And another little idea of what this means was from one of the posters I saw from the first days of the protests, which was saying, but we had started to win the war. And it sounds incredibly simplistic, but that's actually at the core of what this is about, because it's true that we are now, summer, 2026, the 50 year of the full-scale war, after

many, many years where people kept telling us that, you know, time is on Russia's side,

know, it's just, we're barely holding on for survival.

“And now we're in a time where not only do we see these amazing deep strikes on Moscow, creating”

a real strategic political pressure on Russia, we see the lockdown of logistics all across the occupied territories, including to Crimea, and we see almost no, you know, very, very little compared to last summer, for example, or the previous one, actual advances on the front line. And so, Ukraine has put itself in the best strategic place in the war, then it's being

since I would say even, you know, autumn 2022, when they had just done a few very successful counter-offensive. And that means absolutely everything for scenarios of, of ending the war, you know, putting

that pressure on Russia to finally wind the war down.

And Ukrainians understand, and we can get into why, is that so much of this can easily be traced to the leadership of Mikhailov Federov, as head of the defense ministry, whether that's, you know, basically in drones and the drone program, both in offensive and defensive drones in military reforms, and it was, it was this positive trajectory, this kind of optimistic trajectory that we were on, that was clearly connected to this one guy who was, you know,

he maybe he shouldn't be put on a pedestal, but he was a very unique and incredibly effective bureaucrat, and he didn't even have political ambitions, you know, he was very quiet politically, and we knew a lot about the positive changes he was bringing, and a lot of people, you mentioned the conflict with Sirski and we'll get into that, a lot of people understood that they would be clashing as soon as Federov came into power, because

“they come from these very different schools of thought, but I think a lot of people”

hoped that at least, at least, Federov would act as a counterweight to Sirski and his old Soviet style of waging war, and maybe with time, if he produced results, which he was doing, then Zelensky could see that it was Sirski that he needed to push out, so at that moment, when all of these factors combined, seeing that Zelensky actually sided with Sirski, under whom the war was, you know, not really going well, and pushing out the guy who was

making all these changes was what caused this feeling of outrage and betrayal, not only among civil society, among civilians thought leaders, but among the military as well. It's worth noting, as well, that Ukraine, of course, has this interesting, interesting reputation of being a country with a bunch of revolutions, and a lot of protest activity, you know, in 2014, we had a revolution of dignity, and we were with true victory in the Covid.

You know, the Ukrainian civil society is famously very active, but during the full-scale invasion, all of that protest activity has been kind of put under a lid, because there was this understanding that the country has to stay united, and there was this sort of default trust in the government, and people swallowed a lot of corruption scandals, a lot of problems have been swept under the rug. And the first time Ukraine had mass-country-wide protests during the full-skill war,

was actually last July, exact same month, which, you know, now is a cause for a lot of memes and jokes in the subject. Last July, there were the first mass-country protests since 2022, and it was about the government's decision to strip away the independence from Ukraine's anti-corruption infrastructure. But now, a year later, people come out and protest again,

“and I think what's also important to mention here is that Zelensky, part of the problem,”

is that Zelensky didn't actually explain his decision, which I think angered a lot of people,

right, because it felt like this was such a critical decision that was being made not only

without any consultation with the public, despite the public's thinking and the public's desire and the public's support for federal, but also without even an explanation of what federal did or didn't do, that necessitated his dismissal, right. And so eventually, you know, when the protest kicked off, Zelensky told the media and the lawmakers that the problem was that federal didn't get along with general Alexander Stersky. Zelensky was pretty open about it,

and basically that the minister of defense and the commander-in-chief were at conflict with each other, it was bad for the country, he could no longer mediate between them, and he had to choose aside. And he ends up seemingly choosing the side of Stersky. And this, as you've said, is that the heart of this whole saga, right, the conflict between federal and Stersky, and then subsequently

history and we need to explain to the audience who these two men are, as you've said, they come from

“two very different schools of thought, and, you know, their rise to power is very different,”

and I want to start with general Stersky. Tell me a little bit about his background, some of his achievements, and how he was appointed the commander-in-chief of Ukraine's armed forces. Yeah, so general Stersky, then the man who has probably taken up a lot of my time and an attention and feelings in the last two years, because this has indeed been something I focused a lot on in my reporting, the leadership of the Ukrainian military, the command culture inside

the Ukrainian military, and specifically the systemic problems that were basically undermining Ukraine's

fight in this war. Ukraine's attempt being mostly on the defensive to hang on against a numerically vastly superior opponent. But we'll get to that. Starting with Stersky, he's quite old, and he's still a graduate of military academy in Moscow. He's actually Russian himself, and a strange little side fact I don't want to get into conspiracy theories. I definitely don't want to do that here, but he still has family in Russia. And he graduated from first military academy in Moscow,

and he was already serving in the Soviet army, and then throughout the history of independent Ukraine, he was climbing up the ranks in the Ukrainian military, which until 2014 was very much a kind of stagnant legacy institution of the Soviet military before that. But obviously he had a lot of military experience from the war in Donbas that started in 2014, Russia's proxy invasion, but he really came onto the scene at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when he was the leader of the defense

of the Battle of Kiev. And that is, you know, and that is no mean feat, the Battle of Kiev, I guess, even with all the events we've had in this full-scale war, it remains the most consequential, because that was Russia's attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian capital in just a few days, and, you know, while also attacking the country from three different sides, and that was a pretty monumental effort. And then he also led the counteroffensive in Kharkiv region that autumn. So in

September, when Ukrainian forces broke through Russian lines and captured huge territories and and hundreds of pieces of military equipment in Northeastern Ukraine, in what was still probably, you know, since the Battle of Kiev, still probably the most impressive single military victory

“on the battlefield for Ukraine. And that's what Silsky is good at. He's good at old school,”

conventional tactics, you know, maneuver, you can imagine a guy with with the tanks and the the foot soldiers on the map and like breaking through here and outflanking there, that's what he's good at, but that's not what his job has been since becoming commander in chief. So he became commander in chief in January 2024, and if we rewind to that part of the war, this was after, you know, we had clearly understood that Ukraine's summer 2023 counteroffensive

had failed pretty dramatically, and Russia was already attacking on several different fronts, especially in the Donbass. And the understanding was that, you know, there's not going to be enough strength for another counteroffensive, and it already went really badly. Now, we're going to be on a defensive posture strategically. It's our job to defend as efficiently as possible against an opponent, which just has more and more manpower, just coming in and in from Russians

in, in depressed towns in Siberia, signing their contracts. But this has not seemed to be a task that Silsky

“has been great at, and we can get into the reasons why, first of all, I think there's a lot of”

issues with the personal kind of command culture that he basically propagates in his army. It's very, very Soviet, and for people, maybe in the West, who don't quite, maybe know what I'm

talking about immediately. If you've seen the amazing HBO mini series Chernobyl, and you think about

how the different bureaucrats and the local chairman and the council president, Pulit Bureau, people are all talking about this disaster in the aftermath, and no one is taking responsibility. Everyone is saying it was his fault. No, no, no, that's not happening. Reality was being denied.

presence, probably worse, in the Russian military, but also in the Ukrainian military. And just to give

you an example of what that looks like, that looks like basically everyone along the command chain

trying to avoid responsibility and a very centralized top-down kind of style of command. So, if we imagine, let's say, a part of the front line with a village and Silsky and the general staff are giving orders to the commander to hold this village. But they're running out of people. They've been holding this village for for weeks now, and they're running out of infantry to hold it with. And maybe there's a river behind the village. And they say, can we retreat to that

river? That's where we'll be, you know, better at defending. And there is the order, no, you have to hold that village. But we don't have any more people to hold that village with. No, you just have to keep holding the village. And so, eventually, they lose that village, but the commander doesn't tell the general staff about this, because they're worried about punishment. So, this is again part of the Soviet system and so about lies. And then suddenly the brigade to the left of the village

is not being told that they've lost that village, because the brigade didn't tell the truth. And suddenly they have Russians coming in from their flank. And that's how you lose

“way more manpower than you need to. That's how you create chaos on the front line. That's how”

am I right in understanding that you're describing an extremely typical scenario for your crane? This is not a one-off. This is common, right? Yeah, this is a completely, you know, placeholder kind of situation. And I don't that, that this can happen on a larger scale as well, you know, within entire cities that are with orders to hold entire cities, even though there's no one left to hold them. And they're being surrounded on three sides. But there's just this order from the top.

And if you don't do it, then you're going to be punished. So you lie and say that you've done it. And so on and so on. You know, this, this all leads to, as I said, excess losses. And that's exactly what Ukraine should be trying to avoid in an additional war against an opponent with a lot more people, not just because Ukraine actually cares about its people, unlike Russia, which uses their soldiers, a single use kind of assault troopers. But also because that's not a way to win the war,

holding onto every village until the last man and hoping that Russia somehow runs out of steam first.

I remember when he was just appointed immediately, I've heard a lot of people in the military or adjacent to the military calling him a butcher saying that, oh, this is going to be horrible for the military because he has this reputation of being in butcher. Did that prove like the right and his shoulder reaction and the right assessment? Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about a Ukrainian commander being called a butcher, I do want to say that that's, you know, it's, it's a very

emotional and black and white and a horrible thing to just throw around and it gives a certain picture of the Ukrainian military that puts it somewhere near the Russian military, which it isn't.

“But if those allegations are being flown around, you should look at why that is. And this”

is getting down to, to what I was talking about, you know, in general, again, that's no way to, to have a strategy against a numerically superior opponent and a lot of people going to point out that we don't really understand what Sirski's strategy is. It really is, you know, in an interview he said, my strategy is the defense of Ukraine and that's really what it seems like. And a good example is the course incursion in Tarsha where, you know, he did this really well planned kind of

tactical breakthrough across the state border and took quite a bit of land. But then there was no

plan for, for what to do with that. In fact, it only made the defense of Ukraine more difficult because Ukraine's military that was already short on manpower and already overstretched was now defending a lot more territory in an area, which was, you know, surrounded on three sides. It had terrible logistics and over the next seven or eight months they slowly lost that territory, took more losses than they should have retreated a lot later than they should have and it just didn't bring anything.

“Which probably mentioned also the assault forces that were created under his initiative. Is that right?”

Yeah, and this is what I was going to get to. I think the thing that is really escalated the criticism over the last year has been the way that he has prioritized and kind of given this privilege status to a small handful of units that were separate assault regiments or battalions and have now

entire core. So the most notorious unit is the 425th assault regiment. It's known as Scalia and

“it has received, you know, well, ordinary brigades are screaming for just, you know, maybe 50 extra”

infantrymen per month. It received about a thousand extra infantry per month and what it does with those people who are often, you know, the lowest of the low in terms of the quality of these mobilized recruits. We've had not only just hearsay but an actual big investigation with a lot of testimony talking about many cases of abuse, violence, really inhumane conditions inside the base of this unit. And then, of course, on the battlefield because they keep getting more and more people and they've

been given orders by Sirsky to just, you know, attack here and here and raise a Ukrainian flag here or there, which is something the Russians do a lot. They take huge losses. And again, when we're talking about excess losses, all of these things do so much harm in terms of exacerbating,

“not only the manpower crisis for the army on the battlefield, but the tensions in the whole”

country around mobilization, because we've had forced mobilization in Ukraine for a few years now.

It is the biggest source of internal political tension in the country and basically leading the military

in a way where they're being abused in training and they're being lost a lot more on the battlefield. The necessary does so much harm to the trust between the state, which is doing this mobilization for the sake of this existential war and the society, which doesn't want to capitulate to Russia, but is not happy with what's going on, not only with people being dragged off the street, but then, you know, how they're actually being used. A common comeback, I kind of hear from

people who may be support Sirsky. You know, some of the leadership of these infamous assault units,

“for example, is that, you know, oh, you know, these civilians, these journalists who are talking about”

all of this don't really know what they're talking about, right? They're not fighting, they're not in the front line, they don't understand the full picture. And thus their criticism of the general is unwarranted. You, of course, traveled to the front line, you know, at least every month. You're there all the time. It's actually kind of hard to catch you and cave to do these recordings. You speak to, you know, an infinite number of soldiers and commanders. Would you say that everything you've just described

is also how people inside the military feel about Sirsky? I mean, there's no kind of black and white answer, but underhaul those of those of the commanders who are trying to think about strategy as well, those of the commanders who have been on the wrong end of these orders, you know, which are impossible to fill out, for example, to carry out, you know, battalion commanders, you know, being told at a point where they've got no more infantry and they're being attacked on on two different sides

and they're being told by the general staff, find some infantry, you know, transfer your artillery people, your drone pilots, your drivers to infantry and attack up the middle, just, you know,

basically suicidal orders. And any attempt at pushing back on that is, is only responded with,

"No, carry it out or you'll be punished, you'll be caught, martial, you'll be investigated." And so there are a lot of these horror stories. At the same time, of course, Sirsky has set up a system with a lot of loyal people in high places, a lot of loyal commanders of the corps or of large brigades, you know, he changes brigade commanders a lot, if one brigade is losing territory, instead of, you know, finding out what were the issues about what happened there, usually just

switched the brigade commander. Another thing is that I would say a lot of commanders understand that they have to, you know, kind of, make their compromise with Sirsky and the leadership, the military, you know, it's not a democracy, it's a hierarchy and you can't just be, you know,

speaking out and are billing whenever you want and basically they're not happy about how the

military is being led, but they, you know, they didn't speak out against him and they just focus on trying to make their own, you know, their own part of the frontline as strong as they can and make do. Okay, so on one side of this conflict, you have this old Soviet-minded general

be more different from Sirsky, I guess the only kind of interesting similarity between them

“and that is that, and we'll talk about this more later on is that both of them actually have been”

really loyal to the president, which makes this whole saga, you know, extra interesting to analyze. So, Fedorov, he built a career in AT&T in marketing and in 2019, when Zelensky was running for president, Fedorov was actually in charge of Zelensky's online campaign, of his online comms. He ran his social media and I think it's fair to say that he very much helped Zelensky win the election in a landslide. So, then Zelensky becomes president, he wins and he gives Fedorov the job

of minister of digital transformation, which is a new job, essentially created for Fedorov, Zelensky creates the new ministry, and Tasks Fedorov with reforming the bureaucracy of the Ukrainian government services, something similar to Doge, maybe, for the American audience, except I think, you know, subjectively in the Ukrainian example that actually worked really well.

“I think Doge was all about just like chainsawing the bureaucracy, and did they create anything good?”

I don't know. Okay, and this is a relevant solution, not good, down to friends. But Lofer has had an immense amount of coverage on it, so our audience is all caught up on that chain sawing. Anyway, at the point that Fedorov becomes the minister of digital transformation, this is kind of astonishing, but he's only 28 years old. How old are you, Francis? 29. What have I achieved in life? Yeah, I mean, I'm 25. What have either of us achieved?

So Fedorov becomes minister, and for the next seven years, until January of 26,

he has this kind of unprecedented, amazing track record at the ministry, which kind of functions

as like its own little standalone bubble within the Ukrainian government. He launches a number of broadly successful and popular reforms. He doesn't really get involved in any corruption scandals, which is very astonishing for Ukrainian public official. There's a very small number of Ukrainian officials who can really walk out of the Ukrainian government unscathed, and he's one of them. He survives several government reshuffles without losing his job, and then when the full

foundation begins in 2022, he starts pivoting to the defense sector as many others and Ukraine do. So, Francis, could you describe some of those defensulated projects that Fedorov starts working on before he's ultimately appointed as the Minister of Defense in 26? Yeah, sure. So, I mean,

“it started. If we go all the way back to 2022, I think it's worth remembering that the war looked”

completely different to what it does now. It was mostly a conventional war of artillery and tanks, and how it's as mortars and armoured vehicles, but people understood that drones were on their way,

and they would be a game changer, and especially on the Ukrainian side that they needed to leverage

technology as much as they could to stay in the fight against once again, and opponent with so much more manpower and firepower. So, Fedorov made the first, he drove the first steps in that direction in terms of centralizing, innovating, and scaling up the integration of drones from the defense tech side, you know, to help the military, because until then, you know, there was no procurement of drones. The military just, you know, random groups of soldiers started

using them, paying for them themselves. And so, he started with this kind of army of drones, project, which was an easy thing that everyone could donate to, and that was a nice brand that they could, you know, talk about promoting and getting funded from partner countries in the meantime, and connected to that was the United 24 fundraising and media platform, which was originally, you know, very much about supporting this army of drones project.

But very quickly, it started to grow and become more mature, and that's where another quite famous brand for anyone who's focused on defense tech in Ukraine is the brave one innovation cluster, which is, once again, a government kind of initiative from the ministry to bring together innovators, defense tech producers, to connect them with foreign partners, to help fund promising ideas, and so on and so on. This is still from the minister of digital

transformation, right? Yeah, but the most important thing, which people actually don't really

is the fact that he threw the ministry of digital transformation, he was also kind of overseeing

“a different government agency called the State Service of Special Communication, and this agency”

was in charge, an initiative in a plan kind of driven by federal of in charge of procuring drones

for the military, and so in charge of basically working between the military and this completely

new ecosystem of Ukrainian defense producers, which were just, you know, shooting up out of nowhere, some of them really good, some of them kind of dodgy or corrupt, and creating basically from scratch an infrastructure where the state would procure these drones with big contracts that would allow these producers, the good ones to scale up production and really, you know, provide drones, high quality drones to the military in a centralized and kind of organized way, because if we

remember, people maybe who followed the war, they had this image of these drones, which were

“being, you know, assembled by volunteers in their garages, and that's how the plucky Ukrainians”

were fighting, that's actually a terrible way, you know, to win a war in the long term, you need industry, you need scaling up, you need everything to be organized, to be optimized, driven by

data, basically doing everything to tighten the feedback loop between producers and the military,

and this is what Fedorov's initiative here was all about, and this was actually the, you know, in the context of this was where I met Fedorov, my only time actually meeting him, but he hosted an offer record for journalists in late 2024, and he decided to host it at one of the factories of one of the biggest drone producers that had gotten a lot of these contracts, and I visited and, you know, this, I think, maybe even more than almost any frontline visit, this was like

the moment, which, which changed everything for me, in terms of understanding how war was changing, just seeing this factory, which was producing up to 4,000 drones per day. Wow, that's an astonishing number, and that was around the time that Ukraine was struggling to get shells, and people were talking about, you know, oh, this new European factory is going to build 2,000 shells per month, and here I was in a, in a kind of old warehouse in Kiev, in a place that was making 4,000 drones per day.

Yeah, it's, it's really worth remembering, sorry, I'm, I'm going to drop you for a second, but

it's worth remembering that, you know, we all think of drones as being like the game changer of the

world in Ukraine and, and ultimately the future of warfare, but there was a time not so long ago when this wasn't yet the case, right? There was a time when this technology was just originating, and there were a lot of skeptics, and people didn't really know what it was, and, and there were some people sort of driving that change, and that was very much one of those early pioneers of that technology in a way, right? Yeah, and as I mentioned with the volunteers in the garage, there's a lot of,

a lot of the initial advancement in drones was kind of just out of necessity because, you know, Ukraine just didn't have enough shells, and they, you know, with the shells that they had, they just couldn't stop Russian advances, but in the meantime, Russia was also, you know, moving forward with drones, and, and some of, you know, they've also done their own innovations, which Ukraine has copied like the fiber optic drones, but when we're talking about a war at this scale,

against an enemy at that, you know, has its issues, but it's also not standing in one place, that's exactly what was needed at the time, and it ended up being a very nice transition for him going from that to the defense ministry, because in that flexible role as minister for digital transformation, and you could see the way, you know, just looking at him, though, he talks about all these different initiatives, he just has this drive to kind of put his nose in all kinds of

different places and processes that might not necessarily immediately fall under his portfolio, but he'll do it anyway, and he'll gather data, he'll try and solve a problem, and just optimize

“anything he can get his hands on. Do your current managed services really help run your operations?”

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of the fiscal invasion when Federer of tweeted at Elon Musk, right, asking him to activate

Starlink over Ukraine, of course we now know that Starlink played an extremely crucial role in

“the war, helping Ukrainian forces, and then Federer of became Minister of Defense in, I think, January”

2026. At that point, reportedly, he's been eyeing that post for a very long time. He really wanted that job. He finally got it. I remember initially, people in my bubble, journalist analysts, people adjacent to the military soldiers were very happy because he had a very good reputation. One of the first things he did correct me from wrong, but was also again related to Starlink. He asked Starlink to basically, like basically introduce mandatory registration for every single

Starlink terminal operating in Ukraine, which basically meant that now the Russians could no longer use it because the government had to manually approve every single terminal, and it really affected everyone. Literally, myself included my terminal shot off just one day, and that had a huge effect on the battlefield, right? A huge positive effect, and it really worked. It crippled Russian battlefield

“communications, and I remember thinking, like, this was such an obvious, easy fix, like, why did it”

take a new Minister of Defense to come up with that idea and do that outreach? I mean, why couldn't the previous Minister, you know, or was it a matter of or the guys before him do that? But anyway, Federal of Spent only six months on the job, what is his track record? I mean, we already said a lot of good things, but let's get into some details. What has he been able to achieve in this short amount of time? Yeah, I do want to just quickly pause on Starlink because, again, it's difficult to really

measure, you know, all of the factors that go into, you know, this general feeling of the needle shifting towards Ukraine and the tight turning in Ukraine's favor this year, but from all of my conversations with military and with top analysts, everyone says that that has been, like,

probably the single biggest game changer this year on the battlefield. In fact, I was out there

on the front line when that happened, and I was still driving around burned out trucks on key logistics routes, like over 50 kilometers back from the front line, that had started being hit by Russian drones using Starlink. In the same way, we've now seen Ukrainian drones do the same thing to Russian logistics really far behind the front line. And we were there when it happened and immediately the commanders that we were talking to were texting them and they were saying, you know, the

Russians are panicking, you know, their communications are not working, their unmanned ground vehicles are not working, and now they can't do these midrange drone strikes, like they were doing before, and Ukraine can. And now this is like such a clear technological edge that Russia simply, like they're trying different things, and maybe with time they'll get close to some kind of

alternative, but it's just impossible to even, like, overstate how crucial it's been on the battlefield

this year. Apart from that, we've seen a lot of interesting things. We've seen

“better of being really interested in the manpower question, which I think was part of what really”

escalated his feud with Sirski. He conducted an audit of losses, which is the opposite of what the general staff and the Sirski has been doing, so he actually understanding like, you know, where are we losing people, what are we losing people, because of and, you know, how could we lose less people? It seems like a kind of obvious thing to think of, but it's the, what the general staff was ignoring. He put forward a kind of a system to make sure every brigade has at least a

standard, like, base quantity of drones that they're getting. Federal of his famous for the gamification system, where the most effective units get more drones, which has its own, you know, kind of logic to it, because when I've seen that on the battlefield, because elite units are so much better at solving all the problems, they should get more drones, but it's also important that every unit has a base amount that they can actually continue their work with. And he tried to do that

with manpower as well with the actual replenishments that we were getting, that they were getting, but that's again where he comes into contact with Sirski and his plans for, again, prioritizing

and this was actually less popular among the military, but once again, you can see the logic, he introduced new contracts, a new system of contracts under which you could sign these fixed-term contracts. And if you were an infantryman or an assault soldier, you would actually be earning

“about, I think, five times as much as what they were currently earning as combat pay. And basically”

the idea of making the infantry and the soldiers, you know, they should feel that they're the elite, they should feel that they're doing the most dangerous job and that they should be compensated accordingly. And if you think about that philosophy over a form to what was going on in the assault forces, again, it's completely like it cannot coexist. It's also worth mentioning that this is such a touchy subject and such a sensitive, you know, issue to address and no one wants to take

responsibility for this issue. And you can criticize, you know, Federov's attempt as much as you want, and people have, and he's admitted openly many times that not everything was perfect in their form that he's put forward. But I think it was fair to say that he came to the job and he

wasn't scared to tackle that issue. If anything, he wasn't enthusiastic about finally doing something

about it, even if it's imperfect, even if it needs to be perfected, you know, in the process of talking more to military, he was still trying to address it. And I think that, you know, that deserves

“praise. Yeah, and that's why when, you know, we heard reports, you know, very reliable reports coming”

out that one of the justifications internally that Zelensky had for dismissing Federov was that he failed with reforming mobilization and reforming the kind of recruitment offices who are, you know, taking people off the streets, which isn't even his responsibility. They work under the command of the ground forces. And mobilization and this whole, like, you know, drafting of people on the streets, that's something that nobody has wanted to touch, not the military, not the defense ministry,

and especially not the president for the last two years as it's becoming, you know, as it's become the most, you know, difficult internal issue because it's so politically controversial and sensitive. And Federov, you know, was trying slowly, you know, by, you know, he wasn't getting in necessarily to the, to the, the meat of the actual, you know, taking people off the street part, but he identified that it was the conditions of these people in the military, you know, in training, in their actual

combat units and their pay and that kind of thing that was going to be crucial to at least

alleviating the manpower crisis going forward. He also tried to have an emphasis on foreign recruitment and every step of the way also have an emphasis on, you know, letting drones do the assaulting instead of people, which is something, you know, it's, it still seems like future war stuff, but we are slowly moving in that direction, but it's not something that the general stuff has ever showed much interest in. Probably the single biggest reason why Federov has been so popular

“in recent months is because he's, I think, widely credited with Ukraine's successes, with its”

drones strikes, particularly the middle strike campaign that's hitting Crimea, that's hitting

occupied Ukrainian territory and crucial logistical routes there. Can you talk a little bit about

Federov's efforts there and, and, you know, some of the results of that work? Yeah, so Federov has been, again, after, you know, building on his close relationships with Ukraine's top training units that have been, you know, built up through his time as Minister of the Digital Transformation, you know, where he led this gamification system and really pushed forward the advancement of the unmanned systems forces. He's since been, been working with them on basically giving the best

drone units, especially those focusing on middle and deep strikes. So middle strike is like maybe I would say 50 to 200 miles and then deep strike are the ones that are going deep into Russia, hitting refineries and so on and together those, those two components and Federov pointed out that the military was just focused on the front line. But these two components are what can bring real strategic pressure, asymmetric pressure on Russia. You know, it's one thing for Russia to be,

you know, moving slower on the front line, but if they can't supply Crimea with fuel or any other supplies or if they're having a fuel crisis across the whole country, that is what can change

is something that, again, the general staff under Sirsky doesn't seem to have really had,

“and Federov, you know, he, he, there was already a deep strike program, but he understood,”

okay, this is the time to push forward with this now. So he, he kind of made some really big procurements for the middle strike and the deep strike drones worked closely with people like you know, the people at Palantir to to optimize, you know, the deep strike program, which requires a lot of data and optimization and doing things intelligently, which I don't really have expertise on technically, but we saw the results of it. And the thing is that the results that we've seen,

not only the middle strikes, the Crimea, that the logistics lockdown, but also the deep strikes, these all fit perfectly with Zelensky's plan of pushing Russia to the negotiation table by Autumn this year. He's talked about it. He's talked about this like 40 day, kind of political and military push on all fronts. And, you know, Zelensky's actually become very popular, his popularity is bounced back up after these corruption scandals in many ways,

thanks to Fedorov's work. Right, and this sort of strategic thinking that Fedorov has had, has been kind of part of the problem in terms of his relationship with, you know, Zelensky and other generals, because I've, there has been reporting that the general staff, perhaps, was not very happy with him taking the initiative and all of these things and kind of frustrated that, you know, the Minister of Defense has a job and that doesn't actually include all of these sort of strategic

actual warfighting battlefield things and sort of, you know, have been pushing him to stay in his lane and not involved. But he wanted to get involved anyway, and you could argue whether, you know, whether that's kind of a civil military relations conflict and maybe Fedorov was actually

“stepping in somebody's toes, but at the end of the day, I think it's fair to say that it was”

working. He may have not been following his protocols and his job description exactly to, you know, to, you know, more for a word, but, but what he was doing, whatever it is that he was doing, it was working. And you're right that it did help Zelensky's popularity. In fact, so much so that his ratings started going up and he actually helped some meetings with other government officials planning on potentially holding an election in the fall, which is a ludicrous idea for a variety

of reasons. And I've written about this for law fair that gave me dependent, has covered it with length, but regardless, yes, this, you know, the fact that Fedorov has been such a loyal soldier of Zelensky's for so long, hasn't really publicly clashed with him ever. Even even

now, and we'll get to this, a few hours into into the first day of the protests on July 16th,

Fedorov actually organized the press conference. And it was quite an event. In fact, France is, I think, you said on your social media, I saw this that the press conference was a

“turning point in this whole saga. Explain what happened there and why do you think it was so important?”

Yeah, so Fedorov, you know, called the media to Kiev, to basically tell his side of the story. I wasn't there in Kiev at the time, but I was, I was watching it live. And he didn't attack the president for the decision, but he was just explaining, you know, first, what they've achieved in six months at the defense ministry, but then, you know, going straight for the gods and explaining that, yeah, the conflict with Zelensky was the main issue here. And he, he laid out,

I think, an 11 point list of the systemic problems and the military that he identified,

which, of course, are all basically very closely connected to Zelensky's leadership, you know,

just a few quotes from that list. No one is held responsible for anything. Isolation and toxic treatment of those who deliver results. It's impossible to carry out any systemic project because you'll be blocked and constant dishonesty. You know, I mean, he didn't hold back. And basically what that did was make it very clear for everyone in the country that, yes, the conflict with Zelensky was the problem. Zelensky was trying to push federal out, which

federal said directly, he said the general gave him an ultimatum. And what that did was it meant that the protest movement, yes, they wanted federal back, but it made it very clear for everyone, you know, what the real problem was. And then, you know, immediately in the next few days,

volunteer said he's Dernanko, had a big live stream where he, you know, gave his own personal rant about Zelensky. And people kind of started to understand that, you know, with this huge cabinet reshuffle and this understanding of this huge, you know, conflict, you know, just somehow magically reversing everything and bringing federal back to the post of defense minister, they want that, but that's not the core issue here, the core issue. And it's not enough. And it's not enough.

The core issue is Sergei and the way he's been leading them, the military. And what's interesting is that, you know, all of this criticism of Sergei had been there in the information space for years, it had been building up slowly, you know, there were these famous faces that, that they had a lot of public trust like Dernanko who was criticizing him quite often. But this was really

“just the turning point and the breaking point and everyone understood that, you know, that's what”

needed to be gotten rid of. First, that's almost the bigger problem, because that's about our mentality, that's about our strategy, that's about the values that govern how Ukraine is, you know, pursuing this war and people feel that, you know, if the school of war that is embodied by Sergei wins out and leads this country, then it's going to lead us into a dead end or perhaps even destruction. And so now the protests have been all, you know, really focused, even almost

more so on Sergei than on federal, I was there last night, there was more chance against Sergei than for federal, and simultaneously we've seen a lot of military speaking out, not just ex-military, who kind of, again, one of the former servicemen who started the protests, but a lot of acting, you know, military, you know, kind of breaking the rules basically and saying, "Sitsky can f off proudly signed so on and so on." And this kind of flash mob of rebellion and, of course, lawmakers thought

“lead us civil society. The only thing missing really compared to last year's anti-corruption protests”

are the foreign European partners. They've been pretty quiet, we don't know what pressure they've been putting on behind the scenes probably not too much, but, you know, it looks like it since then, since that moment of that press conference and the change in focus, the movement has now, you know,

gained, I think, critical mass, we've seen Zelensky basically holding several meetings per

per day with top generals and trying to find a way out, but there's been more and more kind of anonymous reports basically that the plan is indeed to eventually dismiss Sergei, which is, again, a testament to Ukraine as a democracy with strong freedom of expression and civil society, even in more time, having this ability to hold power to account. Federal was actually a remarkably kind of composed in a way that press conference and, I mean,

in one way he very much, you know, went all out against Zelensky. I mean, he said, for example, one quote, instead of thinking about how to asymmetrically defeat Russia, he, meaning Sergei, thought about how to split the country and this is a big problem. And there are so many quotes like that that you could pull from that press conference, but at the same time, he did not say anything

negative about the president. And if anything, he highlighted the fact that he has always been

in the president's corner, his been the president's ally, has been a part of the president's team, and that also the president has supported his work at the Ministry of Digital Transformation and they've had this good relationship and it is true. They genuinely, as far as we understand from the reporting available, they've had a really good close relationship for many, many years.

“And I think this conflict is quite personal for both of them as well. It's being reported that”

they're talking, they're having, you know, calls and meetings every day. They're talking a lot about how to find a way out of this problem. At the same time, you mentioned the integration process and this is another thing that I think absolutely has to be mentioned. One of the biggest achievements I think of Federer of tenure as Minister of Defence was his attempt to reform the military procurement process and to actually enforce completely transparent tenders and, you know, public procurement

for everything that, you know, goes to the front, all of the drones, the the shallows, ammo, whatever, whatever you can think of. It is a billion, many, many billions of dollars kind of industry

and it is no secret that it's not only extremely critical, but also extremely cropped.

it's been widely reported that he's done a lot to make sure there was no corruption at the Minister of Defence and no corruption, the public procurement when it comes to the military and obviously that has caused immense problems for, you know, all of the suppliers who enjoyed, you know, various links to people making their decisions at the general staff and in the Minister of Defence

“under previous ministers and so I think we shouldn't care ourselves thinking that that wasn't”

part of the landscape's calculation. I think the corruption component of it and Federer of trying to clear the defence sector of corruption was absolutely a part of the problem and now I'm just very curious about what's going to happen in the future because you said that yes, there is a plan allegedly reportedly to dismiss Sirski. Many other commanders are being floated, including some

of the famous ones like the, you know, the head of the third army corps, Bilatski and other

commanders, but what's going to happen if Federer of doesn't come back to the Minister of Defence? And I'm also curious what's going to happen with the societal anger and frustration? What are your thoughts? I know this we're recording this, we're recording this on July 21, Tuesday, this is going to run tomorrow on Wednesday. It's going to be a full week. Are you expecting personnel decisions by the end of this week? Yeah, so it's interesting with the protests because

“the guy who was leading, who first announced the protests, who I think decided he was the”

defector leader of the protest movement, which I don't necessarily agree with, but he came up with a plan that yesterday on Monday was the kind of last kind of reminder protests that you better do the right things, Zelensky, and he gave the president, again, I don't know why he has the right to do this, but he gave the president a deadline of Friday to simply get rid of Sirski

be returned Federer of, which is sounds very, very simple. And basically there are going to be

no protests for the rest of the week until Friday, and if it doesn't happen then he said there'll be a constant protest movement, constant pressure. The danger now I think is that Zelensky is still trying to find a kind of sneaky way out of this, in the sense of we've seen some of the generals that he's been interviewing, speaking to that have been reported to be on the very short list, of the candidates to replace Sirski, you know, some of these are known as being loyal to Sirski,

and some of them barely known at all, but definitely just, you know, kind of placeholders that have been put there in the general staff by Sirski. And in the meantime, we have had reports that Federer of has been offered, you know, all kinds of different positions that he'll be a presidential advisor or he'll be this kind of floating persona in the national security and defense council where he'll be allowed to, you know, put his, put his nose in everything. Well, that was the offer anyway,

but he rejected those offers and said no, no, a defense ministry, you know, being at the core of what's going on and actually having the real power is to to to bring reform is where I need to be otherwise

“I'm not taking any other offer. So I think, you know, Zelensky is kind of looking for a way to kind of”

make everyone just settle down and and find a way and maybe even, you know, satisfy some other political allies who had some corrupt schemes going on. That's speculation to be honest, but I think now,

again, the situation has reached critical mass, I think Sirski definitely has to go and if it's

one of these known aim generals who's just an ally of him, the people won't accept that and once that happens and once we really feel that there is a change in, you know, there is the beginning of a change top down in the culture of the general staff, which most people are hoping for a general called Mikhailo Drapati who used to be ground forces commander and was trying to do a lot of reforms there before he was pushed out allegedly again because of conflict with Sirski. So the idea is if maybe he can come in,

which is, you know, he's what people want the most, then there's no Sirski, there's no conflict and there's a landscape obviously he's going forward with the cabinet reshuffle, but he can slowly,

as defence minister. That would be ideal, but that requires that pressure not to just to start

letting go right at this critical moment. Well, Francis will stay in touch with you as things progress

and we will have you back on for an update on the situation very soon. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope the situation will be better than it is right now. Thank you. Good to talk to you.

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