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In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to dismiss Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, announced on July 16, despite Fedorov’s relative popularity, triggered a political crisis. Tens of thousands of protesters marched across the country, from Kyiv in the north to Odesa on the Black Sea coast, and from Lviv on the Polish border to Kharkiv, just a few dozen kilometers from the Russian front. The demonstrations were marked by nationalist sentiment as protesters demanded that the government provide better leadership for the military to win the war.
These demands followed an explosive press conference given by Fedorov, during which he leveled scathing criticism at the handling of the war and, in particular, at the chief of the general staff, Oleksandr Syrsky. He laid out his views on the main problems plaguing the Ukrainian army, notably condemning the stifling of initiatives, the appointment of officers based on their loyalty to the regime rather than their military competence, and the lack of transparency regarding supplies. He also criticized the unwillingness to limit casualties, chaotic appointments, the army’s lack of strategic planning, and the fact that officers are never held accountable for their mistakes.
The protesters, mostly young adults from major cities and members of civil society — a demographic similar to the demonstrators who took to the streets during the Maidan Revolution — were joined by veterans. During the demonstrations, they carried signs deploring Fedorov’s dismissal and demanding Syrsky’s resignation, whom they consider indifferent to the lives of his soldiers because of his military training and adherence to “Soviet” warfare methods.
This event occurs within an ambivalent military context: Fedorov’s modernization of the Ukrainian army has enabled him to massively expand the use of drones to strike deep within Russian territory, even reaching Moscow and targeting strategic energy infrastructure, with the complicity of European imperialists who favor a major escalation against Russia, which might be tempted to do the same. This policy, which includes making the effects of war felt by Russian civilians, receives support from a segment of the population.
But despite this dynamic of horizontal escalation, which seeks to expand the theater of battle, the situation on the front remains stagnant: while a thick no-man’s-land has formed, sometimes more than 10 kilometers deep, resuming a mobile offensive appears very complicated, especially since a war of attrition favors the Russian army. While the situation is extremely dangerous, primarily for Ukrainian and Russian workers, the conflict could spread further as soldiers fall by the thousands on both sides of the front.
Syrsky’s apology to Fedorov on July 20 was not enough to quell the anger of the protesters, which prompted Zelenskyy to dismiss him the next day, appointing Mykhailo Drapatiy, a young and popular 43-year-old general, as commander in chief of the armed forces. Drapatiy stated in a xenophobic declaration shortly after his appointment that the “Russian nation” had “no right to exist” because Russians had “nothing civilized about them.”
Meanwhile, protests continued in the streets, demanding Fedorov’s reinstatement to the Ministry of Defense. This challenge to the Ukrainian government echoed the mobilizations that had forced Zelenskyy to withdraw a law that would have given him control over the anti-corruption agency NABU.
Fedorov enjoys an image as a reformer, the architect of the successful integration of drones into the Ukrainian army, and Elon Musk’s main interlocutor in disconnecting the Russian military from the Starlink satellite system. He remains a longtime ally of Zelenskyy and served for six years as his minister of digital transformation, notably responsible for developing the Diia application, which digitizes state services and offers, among other “services,” the ability to appear in court hearings via smartphone or to denounce one’s neighbor online as a traitor to the nation. In this sense, his dismissal reveals less about structural differences within the Ukrainian state apparatus than about the existence of deep-seated infighting between different factions.
The coverage given by the Western press to this event, as it had been to the protests against Zelenskyy’s takeover of the anti-corruption agency NABU, demonstrates the bias of European elites, who favored the faction embodied by Fedorov because it was considered the most capable of facilitating the penetration of their capital and ensuring military success on the front. Andrius Kubilius, the European commissioner for defense, expressed his “great surprise” at the announcement of Fedorov’s dismissal, referring to the “extremely important work accomplished” with him. Ukraine’s dependence on the European Union thus largely explains Zelenskyy’s reversals, even more so than the relative influence of the street protests.
Indeed, not all demonstrations receive the same coverage in Western media. On July 8 in Lviv, more than 200 demonstrators spontaneously confronted recruiting officers who were trying to forcibly put a 30-year-old man in a van to send him to the front. When the police arrived the next day, they arrested demonstrators and humiliated them, forcing them to shout, “Long live the mobilization!” These images were not commented on by the Western press, nor by the left-wing parties that support the war and therefore conscription, ignoring the role played by Western imperialists in directing the war.
Yet these events reveal the completely divergent interests within the country itself: between the workers sent to die at the front and the country’s political and economic leaders, supported by European imperialism. It is from mobilizations of this kind, and the organization of the working class in the workplace in opposition to the government’s bellicose authoritarianism, that an independent Ukrainian workers politics could emerge. A progressive symbol of this potential development is a recently released video showing workers in the city of Dnipro driving recruitment officers out of their factory.
At a time when protests against forced mobilization are beginning to develop in Russia as well, and when the government’s popularity is falling in the face of wartime hardships, only the prospect of a union of the Ukrainian working class and popular classes with the oppressed sectors of Russian society, crushed by Putin’s reactionary regime, can end this reactionary war and thwart the Western imperialist interests and Russian expansionist ambitions that clash in this deadly conflict, for which workers, both Russian and Ukrainian, are paying the price.
This article was first published in French at Révolution Permanente on July 24, 2026.
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