The dismissal of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on July 15 has exposed a deeper divide within Ukraine’s military leadership: a conflict between an older Soviet-influenced approach to warfare and a younger generation seeking to modernize the armed forces through technology and institutional reform.
The dismissal has caused week-long protests and is far from resolved. It is about much more than personalities — it represents a key junction in the country’s war for survival.
The decision to dismiss the 35-year-old Fedorov was made without any communication with policymakers or the public and was announced as parliament began a 30-day summer recess. It triggered some of Ukraine’s largest protests since 2022, largely because of Fedorov’s popularity and reputation as a dynamic, IT-savvy minister impatient with the old structures.
Over the past few months, he had become one of the government’s most recognizable and widely supported figures. Appointed Defense Minister in January, Fedorov built on his reputation for digital transformation by bringing the same approach to the military.
He pursued the integration of new technology into the armed forces, a course that some Ukrainian military bloggers argue proved largely successful. At the same time, six months was too short a time to judge the success of his reforms. Many of the structural problems facing the armed forces, with mobilization the most prominent, remain unresolved. His dismissal, therefore, interrupted a reform program whose long-term effectiveness had yet to be tested.
The decision to dismiss Fedorov continued the President’s Administration’s tradition of sidelining figures who accumulate political weight, although the dismissal was explained by deteriorating relations between Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Gen. Olexandr Syrskyi. “I wanted unity very much. The sides did not achieve it,” President Zelenskyy said. He argued that it was impossible to have a military commander and a defense minister unable to communicate.
Fedorov, however, presented a different account during a press conference held amid the protests. “All the initiatives that we proposed began to be blocked, and Syrskyi is not ready to personally talk about problems face to face,” he argued, adding that the general had given Zelenskyy an ultimatum to dismiss him.
If Zelenskyy’s team had thought Fedorov would go quietly, they were wrong. His dismissal opened a Pandora’s box that extended far beyond the fate of one minister. Days of crisis meetings followed as a single personnel decision rapidly escalated into a broader crisis about how Ukraine should fight the war.
The president reconsidered. On July 21, he replaced Syrskyi with Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, a prominent 43-year-old officer with a stellar war record who had supported Federov’s criticisms.
Syrskyi, a 60-year-old veteran four-star general, represents an older generation of officers trained in Soviet military academies who continued their careers after Ukraine gained independence, carrying many elements of that military tradition with them. Having been educated in the same system as many Russian generals, Syrskyi understands the logic of Russian military operations, as demonstrated by his successful operational planning in 2022–2024, including the widely praised Kharkiv counteroffensive.
However, that background also has a downside. Syrskyi has repeatedly been criticized for a Soviet-style approach to military planning that often prioritized symbolic victories over soldiers’ lives.
During the first phase of the war, operations such as the liberation of the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions were fast, innovative, and highly successful. After the bloody battle of Bakhmut, however, Syrskyi acquired a reputation as a “butcher” because of heavy personnel losses (an estimated 10,000 dead and seriously wounded during that 2022-23 engagement) and the continued reliance on costly frontal assaults that treated personnel as expendable.
His reputation deteriorated further following the chaotic withdrawal from Russia’s Kursk region, which resulted in heavy losses. Other criticisms included appointing loyal rather than competent officers to senior military positions, as well as turning a blind eye to human rights abuses within some units of the armed forces, and a chaotic order of battle that saw some units split and others poorly improvised. As a result, Syrskyi’s image struggled to compete with Fedorov’s reputation as a young and innovative reformer.
By contrast, new Commander-in-Chief Drapatyi enjoys broad public support and represents a different generation of Ukrainian military leadership.
Trained in independent Ukraine, all his experience stems from the war against the Russians. Part of his reputation stems from an action in May 2014, when he led his battalion into Mariupol to free hostages held in the city’s police headquarters during clashes with Russian-backed separatists. The video of this encounter is now famous. Less well-known, but more impressive to his comrades, was his fighting withdrawal from Russian encirclement in southeastern Luhansk in 2014 and his stabilization of the threatened Kharkiv sector in 2025. He is also seen as considerate for the welfare of his troops and willing to listen to subordinates.
All of which sounds good. However, the emergence of a younger generation of military leaders does not automatically resolve Ukraine’s challenges. As Antony Lloyd, the longtime Times war correspondent, wrote, only time will tell whether the new men are right or whether Syrskyi fought the only way he could and is “rehabilitated as a commander who unflinchingly accepted terrible costs because no less bloody path existed.”
It might appear Zelenskyy drew the poison from the crisis by appointing a new commander-in-chief, but Federov’s future remains unresolved. The former defense minister says he wants his old job back, and although there is an acting minister, it is still unclear who will ultimately take the position. Reappointing a just-sacked minister might be hard for the president to swallow, while Ukrainian civil society is increasingly demanding a defense minister who also embodies a new approach to waging the war.
Ukraine, therefore, faces a dilemma. At its core, this debate is not about age but about two competing concepts of warfare: one built around hierarchy and attrition, the other around technology, decentralization, and preserving scarce human resources.
The challenge is thus not simply choosing between an older and a younger generation of commanders, but combining two strengths that rarely coexist: the institutional memory and understanding of Russian military thinking possessed by the old guard with the technological innovation, accountability, and adaptability championed by the new one. It is fraught with risk; much like reconstructing an aircraft already in flight.
There is a well-known saying that “a small Soviet-style army will never defeat a large Soviet-style army.” Yet abandoning the experience accumulated over decades carries risks of its own. Whoever becomes the next Defense Minister, working alongside the new Commander-in-Chief, will inherit problems, including manpower and equipment shortages, that have no simple solution and will have to be addressed under intense public scrutiny.
Mykyta Vorobiov is a political analyst focusing on Russian and Eastern European politics, security, and information campaigns. He holds a BA in Ethics and Politics from Bard College Berlin, where his research focused on Russian visual propaganda, and an MSc in Russian and Eastern European Studies from the University of Oxford, where he examined how the Russian state uses political discourse, media, and propaganda to legitimise wartime policies. For the past five years, Nikita has published articles on politics and security for CEPA, VoxEurop, JURIST, and other outlets.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
