Protests in Ukraine’s cities against Zelensky’s removal of defence minister Fedorov
“This is the biggest mistake Zelensky has made in his entire presidency,” Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier, told the BBC.
He enlisted in the army earlier this year because he trusted Fedorov’s team and vision, and said: “I don’t know anyone who supports his decision to succeed him. Neither in the army nor in society.”
“I have a lot of friends in the army. Many of them are dead. I don’t want this to continue,” Maria Lavrynets, 31, told the BBC at a protest in Ivan Franko square in central Kiev. he said. “We see [Fedorov’s] results. “We see the motivation of the soldiers, we must stand by them.”
When Fedorov took office, he set out to restructure the defense ministry, which many in Ukraine felt was too bogged down by bureaucracy and old Soviet-era attitudes.
A former minister of digital transformation, he took an active role from the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 in creating a volunteer “Ukrainian IT Army” to launch cyberattacks against the Russians.
He later led a successful fundraising campaign called Drone Army, incorporating “gamification” elements into warfare, devising a system that gave Ukrainian military units credit for striking Russian assets.
