Mykhailo Fedorov: Ukraine Fired the Man Who Took Weapons Buying Away From Its Generals

Fedorov stripped vendor selection from the General Staff and ranked suppliers on combat data. Zelenskyy removed him on July 15 after the commander-in-chief objected.

What happened

Mykhailo Fedorov told an emergency briefing in Kyiv on July 16 that his first reform at Ukraine's defence ministry took away the General Staff's power to choose who gets paid. "Previously, the General Staff prepared a list of companies and products that had to be purchased," he said, in remarks reported by the Kyiv Post. "We decided procurement should focus on the top 10 highest-quality companies in each category." President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had dismissed him as defence minister the day before, after six months in the job.

Ukrainian lawmakers and officials who have described the rupture put that reassignment of authority at its centre, rather than any disagreement over whether drones win battles. Zelenskyy removed Fedorov on July 15 in a reshuffle that also took out Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, Defense News reported. Thousands protested in Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa, according to the Associated Press. The succession then moved twice inside a day: lawmakers expected Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, Zelenskyy then told a press conference alongside Keir Starmer that Klymenko was only "one of the candidates," per Interfax-Ukraine, and that evening the president wrote on X that he had tasked Yevhen Khmara, acting head of the Security Service, with running the ministry.

The General Staff picked the vendors, and Fedorov stopped it

Under the system Fedorov inherited, the General Staff named the suppliers. Under his, roughly 80 percent of drone purchases went to manufacturers ranked on performance data, with the remaining 20 percent bought through competitive tenders, he said at the July 16 briefing. One 155mm artillery supplier that had opposed the competitive process cut its price by $1,000 per shell once bidding opened, saving the state more than $100 million. A tender for 160,000 medium-range strike drones drew 59 bidders, with expected savings of 20 to 30 percent. Fedorov also cancelled direct contracts signed before he arrived between Ukrainian companies and foreign suppliers.

He acknowledged the damage that did to incumbents. "We acted harshly as a state by breaking some companies' business strategies," Fedorov said. "But how can I justify buying shells we already have in surplus when we have shortages of other types of ammunition?"

Ukrainska Pravda reported that the dispute over his future was sharpened by dissatisfaction among dozens of influential groups inside Ukraine's defence industry that had been losing access to defence contracts. The $1,000 that came off the price of each shell had been going to a supplier that did not want to bid for it.

Zelenskyy told MPs the two men lived in different worlds

Zelenskyy's explanation to Servant of the People lawmakers, reported by Ukrainska Pravda, described a collapse of working authority between the ministry and the army. "They live in two different worlds," one MP quoted the president as saying of Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. "Mykhailo wants to digitalise everything and build the system around technology. The military simply want to be heard. They ask for one type of weapon to be procured, while he refuses and funds other areas instead."

Another source at the meeting recalled a blunter version. "It became absurd. Syrskyi would come and say, 'Fedorov isn't providing anything for specific operations.' Then Fedorov would come and reply, 'We've provided everything, they're just using it incorrectly, in the wrong way and in the wrong places'. And it just kept going round in circles."

Syrskyi had described the subject in those terms himself before the dismissal. Both men publicly denied a rift at the time, with the commander-in-chief characterising their disagreements as periodic and concerning the distribution of powers between the ministry and the General Staff. Zelenskyy told MPs he could not allow the two bodies to fight while the country was at war, and that ideally he would replace both men but could not do so at once. He kept the command structure and replaced the minister.

Fedorov used his exit briefing to press the trade he had lost. Among 11 problems he said he found inside the ministry, he listed a General Staff that had refused for six months to approve a change to the organisational structure, and said his proposed remedy had been "radical personnel decisions," meaning the replacement of both the commander-in-chief and the chief of the General Staff. Syrskyi answered on Telegram by thanking Fedorov for his work and calling for focus on the war, the Kyiv Post reported.

The Crimea campaign runs on the emergency buys

The Economist reported on July 13, two days before the dismissal, that generals had criticised Fedorov at a military meeting in early July over supplies of missiles and ammunition, and that he replied that without the emergency drone purchases he made at the start of the year, Ukraine's current operations, including in occupied Crimea, would have been impossible. Those purchases required borrowing money earmarked for salaries, a risk Fedorov says he took after inheriting a ministry with no budget.

Kyiv removed him in the middle of the campaign those buys paid for. Ukraine released footage of strikes on 20 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and says it has hit 136 ships tied to Russia's shadow fleet in ten days, Al Jazeera reported. More than 200 Ukrainian drones flew at Moscow overnight into Thursday. Le Monde noted that Zelenskyy let his defence minister go at the height of the Crimea offensive. Ukrainska Pravda was harsher, writing that the people who had surrendered the battlefield initiative last autumn convinced the president that victory required replacing the minister under whom Ukraine regained it.

Fedorov's own scorecard belongs to him rather than to the record. In his final report he credited his team with lifting drone interception from 83 to 91 percent and cruise missile interception from 47 to 87 percent, buying more drones in four months than in the previous year, and cutting Russia off from Starlink. Those figures were published by the outgoing minister on his way out of the building.

Zelenskyy's stated priority is the recruitment centres

Both men were answering the same shortage of infantry and proposed opposite remedies. Fedorov's was substitution. "Drone-assault units are a fundamental change in the way we think about deploying infantry," he said at the July 16 briefing. "Technology must be at the forefront of combat. We should lose drones, not people, and only then should infantry move in."

Zelenskyy's remedy is recruitment. He told lawmakers that Fedorov had failed to reform the territorial recruitment centres, and that if Vladimir Putin announces a general mobilisation on September 23, "nobody will be thinking about digital reforms anymore." He first reached for Klymenko, a police officer, arguing that ending the practice of forced mobilisation in which recruiters seize men off the street played to his strengths. He then reached for the Security Service instead. Khmara's qualifications, in Zelenskyy's telling, are experience in technological strike operations, effectiveness in long-range operations, and a security background that "will ensure control over the internal situation across the components of the defence forces."

Khmara's brief as Zelenskyy described it keeps deep-strike operations at the centre of the ministry while moving them under a security officer rather than a civilian technologist. The strike campaign is not what Kyiv is stepping back from. The method Fedorov used to buy it, which was civilian, ranked on data, open to bidders and indifferent to who previously held the contract, is what now has no patron.

What to watch

Fedorov said the ministry bought more drones over five months than in all of the previous year and that most units never felt it, because supply was handed out manually. "If you are loyal, you get something, if you are not, you don't," he said. The baseline provision system he built to end that took four months to agree and was scheduled to start giving every brigade and corps predictable drone supply this month. Its first full cycle will run under someone else, and so will the next round of the tenders that took $1,000 off the price of a shell. Zelenskyy said on Thursday that he had not yet submitted Khmara's nomination to parliament because the legal procedures were incomplete, and that he had not made a final decision on the post.