It took the crowds outside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office less than one week to get the leader to reverse a recent decision. On July 15, Zelensky fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the technocrat who digitized the Ukrainian state and was trying to do the same to its army, and named Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Soviet-schooled commander that Fedorov had pressed the president to remove, as his replacement. A week later, Zelensky reversed course.
Ukrainians are dubbing the protests the “Cardboard Maidan,” after the 2014 demonstrations that drove a corrupt president from office. Every evening for a week, crowds gathered near the presidential office, holding handmade signs torn from boxes and demanding that Zelensky remove Syrskyi and reinstate Fedorov. Soldiers and veterans joined students and activists, and rallies spread to other Ukrainian cities.
Zelensky heard them out, at least in part. He announced the dismissal of Syrskyi and named Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi as the new army chief. Drapatyi, part of the new generation of army leaders, was the combat commander who led an armored breakthrough in Mariupol in 2014 and later helped organize the defense of Kryvyi Rih and the liberation of the Kherson region’s western bank.
But even though Zelensky has accepted the fact that the military needs to change, he has yet to decide whether Fedorov should be given the power to lead that change. The president has offered Fedorov vague government posts, but protest organizers said the demonstrations will continue until he is back in his old position.
“He made the digital passport, digital everything,” a source close to the president told Foreign Policy, requesting anonymity considering the sensitivity of the subject. “This is the only good thing that remains after we are out of power. So, I think he’s become untouchable to some extent.”
Zelensky thought otherwise. He dismissed Fedorov after a meeting with military leadership, which came as part of a shakeup that also removed Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and replaced her with Serhiy Koretsky, a former chief of Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz. The fallout was immediate. Col. Pavlo Yelizarov, one of Fedorov’s own appointees, resigned from his position as deputy commander of the air force. Two well-known advisors—Serhii Sternenko, a drone fundraiser, and Serhii Beskrestnov, a military technology expert—also resigned.
Fedorov made his name as Ukraine’s first minister of digital transformation, the man behind the Diia mobile app that made passports, driver’s licenses, and other government services easily accessible. In a state long defined by paper files, queues, and small bribes, he built an institution that Ukrainians could benefit from and experience. The success of Ukraine’s digital transformation gave Fedorov an independent public standing that few others in Zelensky’s administration possessed. When he took over Ukraine’s Defense Ministry in January, he brought the same method to the war with Russia: more drones and fewer Soviet habits.
Fedorov also brought enemies. Behind the scenes, he played a key role, alongside other senior officials, in pressuring Zelensky to remove Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the President who tightly controlled access to the leader and, as many in Kyiv had long complained, never forgot a grudge. Yermak resigned in November 2025, when Zelensky finally followed his advisors’ counsel and bent to mounting foreign pressure.
The second front for Fedorov was the high military command. He wanted Syrskyi and the generals around him to be replaced with younger commanders who had proven themselves in battle, and who soldiers would trust with their lives. Fedorov had a plan to rebuild the military around technology rather than manpower, with a drone line strong enough that Ukraine could stand as a fortress and curtail Russian advances—with or without a signed peace.
Zelensky has framed the affair as the unavoidable end of a feud, saying publicly that Fedorov and Syrskyi could not work together and that he shared the blame. Syrskyi took command of the army in 2024 and later came to embody the war of attrition.
Born in Russia and trained at a military academy in Moscow during Soviet years, Syrskyi lived his life in Ukraine and earned real credit early on in Russia’s full-scale war, commanding the defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv counteroffensive of 2022—Ukraine’s most spectacular success in the war. But it was the grinding defense of Bakhmut that fixed his reputation, and when he replaced the beloved Valerii Zaluzhnyi as commander in chief in 2024, he inherited an exhausted army without much success to point to. He had a reputation among troops, fair or otherwise, for demanding that positions be held at any cost and for spending soldiers’ lives on orders to defend ground long past saving. In a farewell address, Syrskyi recalled that he had lived through this war since 2014 and had the honor of commanding Kyiv’s defense.
“People recognize that Syrskyi has many achievements,” said Mykhailo Zhernakov, director of Kyiv-based DEJURE Foundation. “But many people within the system, as well as people observing it from outside, associate his name with an old style of command. Ukrainian people are very tired of the old, and they experienced a new quality. It’s not about the names themselves. It is about the style. It is about how we operate and how we fight. If, as a country, we had followed the law, we would not have had this conflict. But many decisions are made in one office that we all know, and that is why the conflict emerged.”
This is the second time since the full-scale invasion launched in 2022 that Ukrainians took to the streets in large numbers and both then and now Zelensky has bowed to their demands. Last July, when he signed a law that gutted the independence of the anti-corruption agencies, protests followed, and he retreated within days. The streets have learned that Zelensky listens, and even under martial law, with elections suspended, protests remain the one check on power that works.
Ukrainians have continuously demanded a clean government since 2014. But many in the government remain cynical about the possibility of running the country in a transparent and noncorrupt way, holding a firmly post-Soviet understanding of politics in which everything is a deal, and everyone has a price. That culture has repeatedly been challenged by a society that expects more from the country that it is fighting to preserve.
Fedorov, activists have said, collided with that post-Soviet culture, too. They pointed to the digital and competitive procurement systems that he introduced, arguing that moving large weapons contracts away from discretionary arrangements threatened powerful interests. Others saw Fedorov’s record as a combination of genuine achievement and cultivated public relations, arguing that his ambitions had taken him beyond the appropriate role of a civilian defense minister.
“He had two big achievements: disabling Starlink for the Russians and heavily expanding the use of medium-range strike drones,” a senior Ukrainian government official said of Fedorov’s accomplishments, adding that Fedorov is a victim of his own impatience and he was going too far. “He wants to rule the army. He wants to plan operations, the military aspect. He thinks he is a minister of war.”
The initial response inside the government suggests that officials underestimated the anger produced by Fedorov’s dismissal. When asked how long the demonstrations would last, one senior official predicted that they would need only a “couple of days to die.” Instead, the protests grew, expanded their demands, and forced Zelenskyy to reconsider the military leadership.
What does Fedorov want next? He has been a loyal soldier for the president, but his popularity has become politically dangerous for Zelensky. “The president is offering him some other job, but that is not a serious move,” another source in the Ukrainian government said. “He has ambition and wants to be in politics, so I would assume he will be ready for elections.”
A recent survey, conducted just before news of Syrskyi’s removal broke, found that 72 percent of Ukrainians opposed Fedorov’s removal, while 5 percent supported it. The survey showed that trust in Fedorov nearly doubled from 35 percent to 65 percent, while trust in Syrskyi collapsed from 39 percent to 23 percent. A majority, 55 percent, wanted Syrskyi gone. And in a hypothetical presidential election, Fedorov polls third at 13.4 percent, behind Zelensky at 22.3 percent and Zaluzhny at 14.9 percent.
This is not the first case of popular people within Zelensky’s government being pushed aside. In January, Zelensky appointed Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, a celebrated spy chief who polled as a potential rival, as his chief of staff—an administrative post that carries enormous power and traditionally even more blame. For years, the chief of staff absorbed much of the administration’s political damage with stalled reforms and palace intrigue being attributed to Yermak, allowing Zelensky to remain above the machinery that he commanded.
Another case is that of Zaluzhny, the so-called iron general who was credited with planning for Russian invasion—even when few in government believed that the war was coming—and subsequently stopping Moscow in 2022. As his ratings surpassed that of Zelensky’s in early 2024, the president removed him from command, citing a need for renewal, and sent him to London as an ambassador. Zaluzhny has stayed away from opposition politics, offering only occasional and careful criticism. Sidelined in the United Kingdom, he is fading from political life, and his deeds may be fading with him.
Fedorov now faces a similar choice. He can accept Zelensky’s offer, remain inside the system, and risk having his popularity fade away by a role with less authority. He can refuse, move into the opposition, and attempt to turn the protests and his record in government into an independent political force. Or he can be reinstated and decide to continue being a team player.
Whatever Fedorov chooses, his political future will not be decided soon. Elections are still far away in wartime Ukraine. The more immediate judgement will come at the front. Ukraine has managed to slow Russia’s advances and has said that it has retaken 700 square kilometers this year.
However, Russia continues to batter Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones, and Ukraine is struggling with shortages in air defense while its army’s manpower problem remains unresolved. Technology and innovation can help Ukraine, but they cannot be substitutes for soldiers. Fedorov has argued that reforming the command structure and improving conditions could persuade more Ukrainians to serve and, if he gets reinstated to his old position, he would be expected to prove it.
