On August 3, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s annual gathering of foreign diplomatic mission heads that long-range strikes on Russia, combined with EU and US sanctions, should force the Kremlin to end hostilities by winter.
The timing looks less like a forecast than a rebuttal. For two weeks, mass protests demanding the reinstatement of dismissed defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov have spread across more than thirty cities, and the July 31 march in Kyiv is thought to be the largest since Zelenskyy took power. Zelenskyy’s message amounts to a claim that Ukraine can still force Russia to the table without Fedorov in the cabinet.
A reshuffle that didn’t go to plan. When Zelenskyy dismissed his government on July 12 — reportedly pushed into it by David Arakhamia, who leads the ruling Servant of the People’s parliamentary faction — he seems to have been confident he could remove Fedorov without much cost. Fedorov was offered a position that would have given him control over part of the defense budget, but turned it down: he wasn’t interested in the money, he wanted the title and authority of defense minister itself. By July 16 it was clear he would be offered no post at all in the incoming cabinet, formally seated the next day. Zelenskyy also seems to have assumed that recent battlefield successes against Russian industry and logistics would be credited to him, as the leader who changed the war’s course. Instead, the public credits the strikes mainly to Fedorov — and the president had overestimated his own standing while underestimating Fedorov’s.
The current protests are larger than those a year ago, when Zelenskyy tried to strip Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies of their independence and was made to reverse course under pressure from Washington. This time there is no comparable external pressure forcing his hand — which is precisely why, if he wants to stay Ukraine’s dominant political figure, he needs to end the protests and shift the mood against him on social media himself, before Fedorov hardens into a standing rival.
The Fedorov–Syrskyi rivalry was never just personal — it’s generational. Fedorov is widely credited as the architect of Ukraine’s drone-and-robotics-centered way of war, and it’s that association, more than his cabinet title, that makes him genuinely popular. Syrskyi, by contrast, is seen by critics as wedded to an older military tradition built around armor and massed infantry — an approach increasingly out of step with a war now being decided by unmanned systems.
Rather than side with either camp, Zelenskyy tried to defuse both at once. He dismissed Syrskyi as Commander-in-Chief, along with several senior generals — but installed Andrii Hnatov, seen as Fedorov’s man, as the new Chief of the General Staff, and made Fedorov’s drone-centered strategy the army’s official doctrine. He removed Fedorov from the cabinet while quietly adopting Fedorov’s people and Fedorov’s war. Protesters aren’t buying the framing of a clean reform, though — they still want Fedorov back specifically, convinced he offers Ukraine a decisive advantage the current team doesn’t.
That leaves Zelenskyy boxed in. He can’t reinstate Fedorov, who has turned down every other position offered to him, without effectively admitting the reshuffle was a mistake. But he also can’t leave the defense portfolio outside the control of his own inner circle — which is what a Fedorov return would mean.
How Yermak’s Fall Set Up Fedorov’s
Before Fedorov, the same reshuffle logic was used on a bigger target: Andriy Yermak, for five years the head of the president’s office and the second-most powerful man in Ukraine after Zelenskyy himself.
NABU (the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine) and SAPO (the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office) were created in 2015 at the urging of the US administration — with then–Vice President Joe Biden overseeing Ukraine policy — and were deliberately insulated from control by the government or the president; by law, their work cannot be restricted or obstructed.
Believing incumbent US President Donald Trump would not press the issue, Zelenskyy moved to bring both agencies under government control. The same July 12 dismissal that pushed out Fedorov also cleared the way: the new government, seated July 17 and headed by Yulia Svyrydenko, was widely seen as close to Yermak, and its formation was officially billed as making the executive “more effective.” On July 22, Zelenskyy signed a law, passed by parliament, giving the Prosecutor General authority over NABU and SAPO investigations.
Washington intervened almost immediately. Within days, the ruling “Servant of the People” party voted to repeal the law it had just passed. NABU then moved against Yermak, whom it regarded as the operation’s architect: an investigation surfaced a scheme in which Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure were allegedly exploited by people close to Yermak to route power to industrial enterprises willing to pay intermediaries. NABU never charged Yermak directly, but its findings left little doubt he knew about the arrangement. He resigned — and with him went the mechanism that had underpinned Zelenskyy’s political dominance.
Zelenskyy’s dominance rests on three levers: control of parliament, the loyalty of the most influential media, and his ability to manage rivalries among senior officials and military commanders — like the one between Fedorov and Syrskyi. He can’t pull those levers directly; he needs a trusted operator who can work parliament and the media on his behalf. Yermak filled that role for five years. Since his resignation, Arakhamia has filled the vacuum.
Seen this way, the July reshuffle served two purposes at once: it curbed Fedorov’s rising political profile, and it replaced a Yermak-dependent government with one built around Arakhamia. There’s no visible rift between Arakhamia and Yermak, but neither has any use for Fedorov as an independent power broker. His return would put the defense budget and military procurement back under his control, hand Arakhamia little from the reshuffle, and leave Yermak’s concessions uncompensated — which is presumably why both men are reported to oppose giving Fedorov any post in the new government. Their alignment isn’t ideological — it’s closer to two allies protecting shared turf from an outsider than any political calculation.
There’s a broader logic behind all of this, too. Zelenskyy is widely believed to see his odds of winning a postwar election as poor, and the reshuffle reads as much like preemptive removal of future political rivals as it does military reform — Fedorov chief among them, with the shadow of Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the popular former commander-in-chief, hanging over the same calculation.
Fedorov, for his part, appears to be betting that sustained protest pressure will eventually force his reinstatement. He has avoided directly criticizing Zelenskyy — even a pre-march interview in which he suggested the reshuffle was really aimed at removing him stopped short of an attack — and no anti-Zelenskyy slogans have surfaced at the marches or in the actions since. He seems intent on being seen as someone the president can still easily bring back in.
Zelenskyy’s underlying wariness of Fedorov looks increasingly well-founded, though. Political journalist and “Holos” party MP Sergiy Rakhmanin noted on August 3 that the president had grown concerned about how much media space Fedorov was occupying. That concern isn’t unreasonable: Fedorov’s team is professional, deeply connected across independent media, and effective on social platforms — and there’s little reason to think he’d have stopped expanding his public presence on his own.
Fedorov’s popularity is real, and much of the public genuinely expects his return to benefit Ukraine. The protests are unlikely to stop on their own, and if they go unanswered, they risk turning from pro-Fedorov to anti-Zelenskyy, regardless of how carefully Fedorov himself tries to avoid that framing. Without US or EU backing, the protests alone can’t force Zelenskyy’s hand — but they can erode public trust in his leadership, and that erosion carries risks of its own the longer it continues.
