“This is the worst mistake Zelensky has made during his entire presidency,” Oleksandr, a Ukrainian soldier, told the BBC.
He had signed up to the army earlier this year because he trusted Fedorov’s team and vision, he said: “I don’t know anyone who supports the decision to replace him. Not within the army, not in society.”
“I have lots of friends in the military. Lots of them died. I don’t want this to go on,” Maria Lavrynets, 31, told the BBC at a protest in Ivan Franko square in central Kyiv. “We see [Fedorov’s] results. We see the motivation of the soldiers, we should stand for them.”
When he was brought in, Fedorov set off to restructure the defence ministry, which many in Ukraine see as too bogged down in bureaucracy and old Soviet-era attitudes.
A former minister of digital transformation, he was active from the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 in setting up a volunteer “IT Army of Ukraine” to launch cyber-attacks against Russians.
Later, he led a successful fundraising campaign called the Army of Drones and brought in elements of “gamification” to the war, designing a system that awarded Ukrainian military units with credits for hitting Russian assets.
