Mykhailo Fedorov's choices: how the ex-defence minister outplayed the puppet master, became a problem for Zelenskyy, and beat a life-threatening illness

In early July 2018, Mykhailo Fedorov, a 27-year-old digital marketing specialist and small business owner from Zaporizhzhia, travelled to Kyiv on a mission that meant a great deal to him.

That day, he had a meeting in Kyiv's Lukianivka district, on the top floor of a new 22-storey building that housed the vast offices of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's TV and film production studio, Kvartal 95.

Fedorov had long been trying to land a popular show as a client, and now he finally had his chance. Serhii Trofimov, one of the studio's executives, was expecting Fedorov to come up with ideas for promoting a then little-known project called "Ze kubiki" (Ze Abs), a fitness blog in which Kvartal's biggest star, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shared his workouts and his journey towards getting into shape.

The project hadn't been too successful since its launch in 2017. At Trofimov's request, Fedorov had set about relaunching the whole thing to make "Ze kubiki" go viral.

After a brief conversation, Fedorov presented his concept for developing the project. Trofimov liked what he saw – so much so that he decided to show it to the "boss" straight away.

"I presented it to him, and he said: 'Great. Oh, Zelenskyy's around right now. I'll call him over and we'll show it to him.' And then he brings him in. And I'm like: 'No way – it's Zelenskyy himself!'" Fedorov tells Ukrainska Pravda, recalling his first meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"He looked at it and said: 'Damn, where have you been all this time? People keep making crap for us, and you've done it so well.'"

At the time, Fedorov thought this was the beginning of a promising business partnership. And indeed, that meeting marked the start of nearly eight years of working side by side. But the partnership almost immediately ceased to be purely about business.

During that very first meeting, Zelenskyy – who was not yet publicly involved in politics and whose plans to run for president were known only to a very small circle of people – suddenly steered the conversation towards something a lot broader than promoting "Ze kubiki".

"We were in the Kvartal office, really high up, with views of the whole of Kyiv. And Zelenskyy says: 'Imagine building a proper state where all government services are online. Everything just a few clicks away, available in minutes. Could you do that?'" Fedorov recalls, smiling nostalgically.

The question was, to put it mildly, unexpected for someone who had only come to the meeting to pitch a concept for promoting a fitness blog.

The answer that Fedorov gave is perhaps the best explanation of what was about to happen to him over the next eight years.

It explains why he would follow Zelenskyy not as a businessman, but as a presidential candidate; why he would run for election as one of the top ten candidates on his party list; why he would become Ukraine's first-ever minister of digital transformation, create the Diia government services app and online documents, and introduce a special tax regime for the IT industry.

And why, after years of civilian digitalisation, he would pivot just as quickly to combat drones, become defence minister, and seek out military technologies and solutions that could enable Ukraine to respond asymmetrically to Russia in an existential war.

Fedorov knew none of this back then in July 2018, and he had none of the necessary skills. He could hardly have imagined that one day he would be responsible for such matters.

But when Zelenskyy asked him directly, "Could you do that?", he replied without hesitation: "We can do anything." He paused for a moment, then added: "But we'll need to figure it out."

Contents

Choice One. Be rich. How Fedorov went from "slacker nerd" and watermelon picker to digital marketing guru

Choice Two. Be in the game. How Fedorov "sold" Zelenskyy to 73% of voters and became the chief architect of "the state in a smartphone"

Choice Three. Be alive. How Fedorov made a back-up of his life and beat a life-threatening illness

Choice Four. Be useful. How Fedorov became the minister of war

Choice Five. Be difficult. How Fedorov stood up for the anti-corruption agencies and rescued the president after the first wave of protests, but failed to shield him from the second

Choice Six. Be yourself. How Fedorov almost fell in love with the Cardboard Maidan, but got a grip on himself and decided to launch a venture capital fund

Cast of characters

Mykhailo Fedorov – innovator, visionary and reformer. According to his fans, the best defence minister Ukraine has had since independence; according to the haters, a dangerous upstart and a spent force.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy – chief architect of the ecosystem that Fedorov diligently worked in for seven years.

The sinister shadow of Andrii Yermak – an unseen but ever-present entity in this story.

Elon Musk – businessman, technocrat and Starlink king.

Fedorov's team – a former adviser to ex-Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili; a technocratic manager; an expert on international law.

Protesters with cardboard signs – the embodiment of people power in wartime.

A chorus of sources in political circles – the people who agreed to talk about Fedorov off the record.

Facts about Fedorov you won't find on Wikipedia

He can't remember the last time he wore a tie. He mostly wears black (Fedorov's team jokes that "his favourite clothing brand is black"). He dreams of starting a chess club. Every morning he walks his Labrador, Sharon. His favourite word for describing the current government is "phobic". He drinks filter coffee and blue tea, a habit he picked up from Pavlo "Lazar" Yelizarov. He loves the shawarma at Steakhouse. He's building up his willpower in resisting sweet treats, with protein bars as his trusty allies.

Choice One. Be rich

Scene: Vasylivka – Zaporizhzhia

Summary: How Fedorov went from "slacker nerd" and watermelon picker to digital marketing guru

Vasylivka is Mykhailo Fedorov's very own Macondo, Gotham City, and even a little bit Twin Peaks. Fedorov is happy to talk about his hometown near Zaporizhzhia in vivid detail, drawing freely on colourful memories.

"The culture there was post-Soviet, prison culture. We even had people who went to prison on purpose to earn the 'social capital' they needed to later become a boss [smotriashchyi, a criminal boss overseeing a particular area – ed.]. Children were brought up according to the rules of the criminal underworld. Everyone knew prison slang. From childhood, everyone was taught to watch what they said. It was every man for himself.

And there I was – on the one hand, I was playing chess, travelling around the region and taking part in tournaments. Then I'd come back, go outside and get into fights. And all of that could happen in the same life, on the same day. It was a life of many colours."

It's in conditions like these that a person's strategy for navigating the rest of their life often crystallises.

"When a group of people gang up on you, there's nothing you can do," recalls Mykola Dukhonchenko, a school friend of Fedorov's. "Mykhailo never forgot those situations, and after a while he might catch up with the bullies and get his revenge."

Many years later, Fedorov's experience in Vasylivka would come in handy in Kyiv. What strategy does he usually go for these days – fight, flight, freeze, or fawn?

"I've seen him use all of those options in different situations," smiles Giorgi Tskhakaia, an adviser to Fedorov who has worked with him since 2022. "But Mykhailo likes to say: 'Let's hack the system.' You have to flip the table – preferably in a 3D model – and come up with an unconventional solution that nobody expects.

There's no point sitting down at a table and playing cards with cheats. You need to flip the table so that you're no longer playing cards but, say, chess. They're still holding the cards in their hands, but they don't realise they're now trying to play chess with them. He's very good at that."

The reference to chess is no coincidence. It's another skill Fedorov has had since childhood. People who have played against him describe his style as balanced. He only attacks when an opportunity presents itself.

"My chess coach had this tactic: during training sessions, when you started winning, he'd come over and turn the board around. Suddenly you'd be playing from the losing position, playing against your own strategy, trying to figure out how to get out of it. Just like in life: sooner or later the board will be turned around," Fedorov predicts.

If you ever ask him to take a "Which chess piece are you?" personality test, you might be surprised by his answer.

"I'm not really a piece. I'm the player, the system designer. I've been managing systems since I was a child."

The systems Fedorov managed as a boy grew in a watermelon field. His first experience of feeling like a self-made man was in eighth grade, when he earned enough money to go to the Crimean seaside resort of Yalta with a friend.

"It was seasonal work," says Mykola Dukhonchenko, who grew up in Vasylivka and now serves in the military. "We worked our arses off all day, and in the evening we got paid. In our friend group we thought saving money was cool. You could even say we competed to save the most," he smiles.

Computer games were another source of income for the young Fedorov. He would earn virtual money and then sell it to his peers for real hryvnias. But the event that changed his life was getting his first computer in eighth grade. His grandma contributed half of the UAH 3,700 price tag (about US$82 as of 24 September 2026), and his parents took out a loan to cover the rest.

"My parents were civil servants," Fedorov recalls. "I hated the civil service, because all we had to eat was buckwheat back then. My godfather used to take me to Zaporizhzhia for my birthday. Once when he was driving me home afterwards in his foreign car, he tossed a BMW bag full of money between the seats. That was the first time I thought: I don't want to live in Vasylivka and work for the state like my parents. I want to be an entrepreneur and make money."

Fedorov would later return to Zaporizhzhia as a university student. According to Maksym Lepskyi, who was dean of the Faculty of Sociology and Management at Zaporizhzhia National University when Fedorov was studying there and describes himself as "favourably biased towards Misha": "He wasn't a straight-A student. There were mediocre grades and skipped classes. We had more than one frank conversation about it in the dean's office.

But whenever Misha promised to sort things out, he always did. He was very keen on attending classes relating to business. Maybe that's a Vasylivka or Zaporizhzhia thing – everyone from there has an entrepreneurial streak."

Fedorov himself paints a more colourful picture of what he was like in those days.

"My friends called me a 'slacker nerd'. I could party with everyone until morning, then go to class and get top marks.

For a while I was able to balance the two. Then, when I was about 19, I was walking somewhere with a friend and his sister, and we were attacked – there were five or seven of them. We knew how to handle ourselves, and a vicious fight broke out. The police turned up, and all the others managed to get away, but we were arrested.

That was when I realised that something had to change radically. Either I changed my life right then or I'd end up dead, like so many of my friends from Vasylivka and Zaporizhzhia – fights, drugs, one person was shot. And that was it. Only the nerd was left."

After this incident, Fedorov rapidly became the city's student mayor, founded an NGO, began writing articles about young people in business, travelled around the country attending training sessions, and started to read a lot.

Fedorov's fixation on business is also evident from his literary tastes at the time. One of his favourite books was… Gogol's Dead Souls. "For some reason it really clicked with me. I reread it later. But to me it was more of a book about business. You know, like business literature."

The Zaporizhzhia sociology student and future digital marketing tycoon was constantly on the look-out for ways to make money.

"As long as I've known him, he's always been trying his hand at some kind of business," recalls Oleksandr Ternovyi, a university friend of Fedorov's. "He grew Yalta onions. Children's play areas with trampolines, shooting galleries and remote-controlled cars for hire were popular back then, and he got into that too. He always invested the money he earned in new ventures."

Fedorov finally got his big break in business after graduating from university, when he and another guy started selling advertising space in lifts. There were around 2,000 lifts in Zaporizhzhia at the time, but for some reason nobody had entered that niche. That enabled them to become an advertising agency with extensive reach and start to bring clients in.

Fedorov later realised, however, that it was hard to make decent money from this because the margins were low and there was a huge amount of hands-on work to do. That was how SMMStudio came about.

"We needed to do something innovative. We realised that we had to move into digital marketing. So we came up with the SMMStudio positioning, but in reality we did everything. The sales departments, the online promotions, the websites, platforms, online shops, e-mail marketing – we did it all."

When Fedorov recalls these stories, you can sense how important his image as a self-made man is to him. At moments like these, it's almost as if the words "I want to thank myself for being me" are written in large letters across his face.

Suddenly his memories take him back to Vasylivka.

"I'd be walking down the street, and there was no paving or asphalt – the usual nightmare of a village street. And there would be planes constantly flying overhead. I used to imagine that one day I'd find myself on one of those planes where everything in the cabin is made of wood, like in American movies."

And eventually he did. But there was a catch.

Choice Two. Be in the game

Scene: Zaporizhzhia – Kyiv

Summary: How Fedorov "sold" Zelenskyy to 73% of voters and became the chief architect of "the state in a smartphone"

As the director of a digital marketing agency, Fedorov, now 26, had to fly from Zaporizhzhia to Kyiv and back three to five times a week. But the cabins on the planes from Zaporizhzhia-based airline Motor Sich were very different to how Fedorov had pictured them in his childhood dreams.

"It's like we say, an 'Ikarus [bus] with wings'!" Fedorov laughs. "I came up with so many jokes during those flights. For example, the pilot boards the plane with a parachute already to hand. And what about this one: why should you fasten your seatbelt on a Motor Sich plane? So they can identify you afterwards."

This was during SMMStudio's peak years, in 2017-2018. By then, the agency was working with many companies in Ukraine. But Fedorov wanted to create advertising for major players like Kvartal 95.

He submitted an enquiry through the landing page of a Kvartal 95 event, and when a manager got back to him, he sold his services in a single phrase: "Your cost per lead is currently US$5. Tell your marketer that I know how to bring it down to US$2."

It wasn't long before Fedorov's work with Kvartal 95 opened the door to the world of high-level politics. He met the studio's executive producer, Serhii Trofimov, who would later invite him to join Team Zelenskyy, known as the Ze!Team. But first, he introduced the marketer to the future president.

That was when the meeting described at the start of this piece – Zelenskyy and Fedorov's first meeting – took place, at the Kvartal 95 office in Kyiv in July 2018.

Sometime in November 2018 Trofimov asked Fedorov: "If Zelenskyy were to run for president, what would you do?" Fedorov took a few days to think it over, searching online for different examples of election campaigns and sketching out his own strategy. Zelenskyy's response to the colourfully-packaged presentation of the plan was short and sweet: "This is just what we need."

From then on, Fedorov was known as the head of the Ze!Team's digital operation.

"Before Fedorov came along, nobody on our team had thought about using marketing for the elections," a senior member of Zelenskyy's campaign team told UP on condition of anonymity. "We'd been planning to proceed in more or less the traditional way: the candidate says 'I'm running for president', everyone claps, then we build the campaign. Misha convinced us that we needed to go down the digital marketing route."

It was at Fedorov's initiative that a website was created featuring Zelenskyy's video "I'm running – are you with me?", which helped attract more than 600,000 volunteers. They would help distribute the Ze!Team's manifesto to pensioners and fight off bot attacks on social media.

In a message sent to Zelenskyy's former top aide Serhii Shefir in 2019 that was later published by investigative journalists from Bihus.Info, Fedorov said he had "increased the budget for bots that would protect us from attacks". However, he denies that he used bots to promote and protect the Ze!Team.

"I'm willing to swear on the Bible that there were never any bots. On the contrary, there were loads of anti-bot projects that we created," Fedorov insists. "We had an army of real people, Telegram channel admins that we worked with. But they were real people. I still don't know how to work with bots to this day. I've never believed that it works at all."

Zelenskyy's election campaign was built around social media. Fedorov's team created unconventional media platforms to support the Ze!Candidate – Telegram channels, Instagram communities, YouTube channels. The result was clear for all to see – in the Central Election Commission's official vote count.

After the presidential election, Fedorov wanted to become the president's digital adviser and carry on running his business. But at the Servant of the People party congress, he discovered to his surprise that he was one of the top ten candidates on the party's list for the elections to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.

UP spoke to Fedorov the day before the party congress in 2019. He insisted that he wasn't going into politics and would not be standing in the election. Yet suddenly he was not only running, but was number 6 on the list.

"If I remember rightly, someone – Razumkov or Kornienko – called me on the morning of the congress and said: 'I'm putting you on the list anyway whether you like it or not. You'll thank me later.' If I could remember who it was [Dmytro Razumkov was responsible for drawing up the list], I'd strangle him," Fedorov jokes.

Interestingly, this wasn't the first time Fedorov had found himself on a party list without making any effort to get there. In 2014, he stood for the Verkhovna Rada on the ticket of "5.10", a libertarian political party founded by controversial businessman Hennadii Balashov. Fedorov insists he was unaware that he was on the list. But he does not deny that he interacted with entrepreneurs who were promoting Balashov's movement.

How did this come about in 2019? A senior member of the Ze!Team says Zelenskyy had instructed them to put together a reliable core for the list – 20-30 people who were politically associated with him.

Fedorov spent just half a day as an ordinary MP. During the first sitting on 29 August, the newly elected parliament appointed a new government, and Fedorov became Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation.

Another contender for the ministerial post was businessman and technocrat Dmytro Dubilet, former Chief Information Officer at PrivatBank and co-founder of monobank.

Some members of the team had been convinced that Zelenskyy would appoint Dubilet as deputy PM and digitalisation minister. But Fedorov turned out to be closer to the president – not least because they had gone through the election campaign together.

"During the first few months in government, everyone could see that Misha could generate a lot more added value than Dima," a senior Servant of the People figure told UP off the record. "Fedorov went on a working tour abroad and came back with a vision for 'the state in a smartphone'. That's how he outperformed Dubilet."

And so Fedorov became the chief architect of "the state in a smartphone" in a country where paper logbooks were still being used for record-keeping. Did he believe that he would be able to implement such an ambitious project when he leapt on board?

"I never do anything unless I believe in it," Fedorov says, clearly proud of the results of his work. "When I joined the Ministry of Digital Transformation I thought it was going to be a lot harder, but we found the key to hacking into the system. It was four months from my first meeting with the migration service – when they told me Ukraine would never have digital ID – to the launch of digital ID."

But at the height of his success, Fedorov had to do the most difficult back-up of his life.

"I've never told anyone about this, but in 2020, when I was already a minister, I found out that I was dying."

Choice Three. Be alive

Scene: Kyiv – university hospital – Cabinet of Ministers

Summary: How Fedorov made a back-up of his life and beat a life-threatening illness

Here Mykhailo Fedorov takes up the story in his own words, telling of his life-threatening illness, the dashboard that saved him from the pit of impending death, the phrase that changed his life, and the book he wrote but never published.

"In 2020, I was diagnosed with a disease with a 17% chance of survival. At one clinic they told me: 'That's it. Good luck. You can go home and say your goodbyes.'

And I thought: no, stop, it's all going to be fine. I can't die now – the world is built on rules: if you believe in something, then you're bound to succeed. I don't know a single person who's believed and taken action and hasn't succeeded.

I was lucky – targeted medication for my disease had been developed in Europe about three or six months before. It became available at another clinic. I continued my treatment there. There were these students that were learning how to administer injections, practising on me. They could never find my veins, so they just used to 'attack'. I'd be lying there, and they'd be assaulting me with needles (he smiles). I kept pointing out: nothing's coming through, can't you see? It was a disaster. But they learned eventually.

There was a set period during which I had to take these medicines. Then they were supposed to tell me whether I was going to live or not. To get myself out of that pit of impending death, I actually made a dashboard in the hospital. It showed how many days were left until I beat the disease and how much of the journey I'd completed – 23%, 27%. I digitised this stage and displayed it on a dashboard. Everyone there was shocked. They thought I'd gone mad.

Then Covid started. I was supposed to be in isolation because even the flu could have been fatal for me. My wife said: 'Don't go to work. If you get Covid, you'll die.' But I went to work anyway. I'd go for chemotherapy at 06:00 and then head to the Cabinet of Ministers and work flat out all day. I survived.

When I was in hospital, I wanted to make a record of the things that were important to me, just in case. So I wrote a book, but I never published it. Basically I made a back-up of my life at that point, recording everything that mattered to me.

In that book, there are things people have said to me that changed my life. For example, when I was six, I learned to ride a bike. My grandad was a carpenter. He wasn't exactly strict, but he was… serious, calm, not very emotional. A real man. He found a broken bike somewhere that someone had thrown away. He brought it over for me, fixed it, bought a wheel for it. Then he said: 'Get on and ride it.' I got on, fell off and said: 'I don't know what to do! How am I supposed to ride it?' He replied: 'Try again, get up and ride. No matter how many times you fall, try again, get up and ride.' And I did. His philosophy became a foundation for me.

I finished my treatment in October 2020. It was five years before they could say for certain that I was cured. And now I've been well for just one year.

It really is a gift from fate, because you begin to understand how people feel when they are dying. The first thing you think about is the things you didn't do (that you wanted to do) because you didn't have the courage."

Choice Four. Be useful

Scene: Kyiv's government district

Summary: How Fedorov became Minister of War and fell out with Yermak

Fedorov set up a gym with a mini football goal and a punchbag right there in his office at 12/2 Hrushevskyi Street, so that he could train and bring down the swelling after his chemotherapy.

Fedorov's office on the sixth floor of the government building was almost an embodiment of Ukraine's digitalisation reform, with innovation existing alongside architecture dating back to the era of the post-Soviet "competent manager". [There is a post-Soviet political cliché that portrays an old-school administrator as a practical, competent leader capable of maintaining order. The term was used in the 1990s to describe former Communist Party officials, factory directors and people from Soviet-era structures who remained in power – ed.]

The deputy PM's reception area was transformed into a lounge where visitors would be offered banana or coconut milk coffee and orange cappuccinos. But Fedorov's young team were unable to get rid of the wooden elements in the interior because of the Cabinet of Ministers' internal rules. All they could do was give the Soviet-era cupboards an IKEA-like appearance by removing the doors and glass.

The minister held meetings around an ancient wooden table. A sculpture of an alien by the artist Yuriy Musatov was a permanent attendee at every meeting. The sculpture even became a symbol of the Next unit within the State Special Communications Service, which Fedorov helped establish in 2023 to test the latest weapons.

This was the office where they discussed the creation of Diia, Ukraine's e-governance app; the digitalisation of Covid certificates; the launch of Diia.City, a special tax regime for IT companies; and dozens of other projects developed by Fedorov's team.

Fedorov tried to push most of the digital innovations through the government, bypassing parliament. During his six years at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Fedorov's major reforms only went through parliament two or three times, a Servant of the People party source told UP.

"And basically he always had a poor relationship with the Verkhovna Rada because he thought MPs were a bunch of idiots, backward-minded corrupt officials, and he was above all of them," one senior Servant of the People figure added.

Whenever a reform did have to go through parliament, there was always a risk of political deadlock. That was the case with the e-Excise mechanism and the state online monitoring system for the gambling industry. Danylo Hetmantsev, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada's Finance, Tax and Customs Policy Committee, is still angry when he recalls that Fedorov's team missed all the deadlines for introducing these innovations.

After 24 February 2022, the Ministry of Digital Transformation went into a new area of work: the technology war.

Fedorov has a tradition: every New Year, he rewatches Home Alone. The way Kevin McCallister defends his house from the burglars is close to Fedorov's idea of modern war. First, Kevin has a plan. Second, his response is asymmetric. Third, through his sheer creativity, he turns stuff that just happens to be lying around into a fortress.

"There were many times when Mykhailo had to be the adult in the room," the former minister's adviser Giorgi Tskhakaia told UP. "At first we thought everyone knew what they were doing. When the war started, it was very hard to accept that nobody really knew what the hell they were doing. Then you'd talk to the generals and – how can I put this diplomatically without sounding too harsh – they didn't really know what to do either. Everything was hanging by a thread. And to stop it hanging by that thread, we had to use technology."

In the first few months of the full-scale war, Fedorov and his team from the Ministry of Digital Transformation worked "in exile" in the west of Ukraine. It was then that he struck up a rapport with Elon Musk.

"Vasylivka was encircled at the time. I explained to him: look, this is my hometown, it has to be liberated. Then we put up billboards [thanking Musk for his support for Ukraine], and doctors and border guards recorded thank-you messages for Musk in English. I sent him a link, and he publicly came out in support of Ukraine.

When he activated Starlink in the liberated areas, I messaged him: 'I love you.' He wrote back: 'I love you too,'" Fedorov says, smiling.

After returning to Kyiv, Fedorov began making regular trips to the front line to find out what the military actually needed in the field, rather than from behind a desk.

"Mykhailo would get the company commanders together and bring generals from Kyiv to meet them," an officer who attended some of those meetings told UP. "He immersed himself in the real situation. Around 80% of his time was taken up with frontline matters."

In summer 2022, Fedorov joined the Army of Drones project. Less than a year and a half later, the first corruption scandal broke over drone procurement. In October 2023, Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies, NABU and SAPO, revealed that the then leadership of the State Special Communications Service had been buying drones at inflated prices. The alleged losses from the schemes totalled UAH 254 million (about US$5.7 million).

Fedorov's critics believe he is personally responsible because the State Special Communications Service was subordinate to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Fedorov sees it differently: "I am responsible for exposing the corruption in the State Special Communications Service," he says.

"I was the first government official to sign a memorandum with NABU and SAPO and give them real-time access to all the contracts. And when I saw there were irregularities, I personally wrote to NABU, and then the notices of suspicion followed," Fedorov says, practically thumping his chest.

The key suspect in the case, Yurii Shchyhol, headed the State Special Communications Service from July 2020 until he was served with a notice of suspicion in November 2023. His appointment was a source of conflict between Andrii Yermak, then head of the President's Office, and Fedorov.

Fedorov had wanted to appoint someone from his own ministry, Dmytro Makovskyi, to head the State Special Communications Service; Yermak had lobbied for Shchyhol. Fedorov sees this as the first political intrigue directed against him.

From then on, Yermak tried to turn Zelenskyy against Fedorov, several sources in the government team told UP. Tensions rose because "Misha never had to kiss Andrii Borysovych's ring to get access to Zelenskyy – he could speak to him directly".

The conflict came to a head in July 2025, when Fedorov rushed to defend the independence of the anti-corruption agencies.

Choice Five. Be difficult

Scene: Kyiv's government quarter, between the two Cardboard Maidan protests

Summary: How Fedorov stood up for the anti-corruption agencies and helped rescue Zelenskyy after the first wave of protests, but failed to shield him during the second

During his first six years in Team Zelenskyy, Fedorov generated pretty much continuous good news for the government. Yet that did not stop him from becoming a major problem for the President's Office after just six months at the Defence Ministry.

It all began in July 2025, when the President's Office and the Verkhovna Rada launched a controversial attack on NABU and SAPO's independence. When thousands of young people gathered outside the President's Office with cardboard signs for the first time during the full-scale war, Fedorov had nothing to do with the scandal. He could have sat it out. But that wasn't his way.

"I just realised that that day I was ashamed to wake up," Fedorov recalls in conversation with UP. "We had a group chat with Oleksandr Korniienko [First Deputy Speaker], Davyd Arakhamiia [leader of the Servant of the People faction], and some others. And I wrote something like: 'Guys, this is going to end badly. I feel ashamed,' and so on.

Then I went to Svyrydenko [then prime minister] and told her. She was also basically a bit frustrated. So I decided to go straight to the president and tell him what I thought."

Fedorov insists that Zelenskyy, unlike those around him, had grasped the situation very quickly.

"One of the advisers said: 'It's not that bad. It's just your hipster crowd making a fuss.' I said: 'Step outside your bubble. Go out into the street. Call your family. Ring your grandma and ask her. She'll tell you.'

"Then Yermak was saying that things weren't that simple and maybe we should only reverse part of it. I said: 'Great idea. Quick, arrange a briefing, get all the journalists together and explain to them that things aren't that simple and only part of it needs to be reversed.' And that was the moment Yermak decided to get rid of me. Within two weeks the president hated me. Veronika Feng Shui [the fortune-teller investigators say Yermak consulted on official appointments] cranked up all her powers," Fedorov recalls.

But that would come later. On 22 July 2025, the immediate task was to stabilise the situation. Rattled by the protests and the dressing-down they'd received from Western partners, the authorities began to swiftly roll back the controversial legislation.

Sources in political circles told UP that it was Fedorov who was tasked with opening a dialogue with the anti-corruption agencies.

"The president basically said to me: if you can talk to them, do it. I invited the heads of NABU and SAPO to my office. They came. I wasn't there as a negotiator," Fedorov recalls. "I simply told them I was giving them the president's guarantee that we would roll everything back 100%, so let's not escalate this any further and let's try to hold onto our international reputation."

"I think that was my role – saving the president, more than anything. Because the people of Ukraine would have reversed the NABU and SAPO situation one way or another, but there might have been no way back for the president," he adds.

His mediation with the anti-corruption agencies had worked. But it wasn't long before Fedorov had to moderate another political process: the underground "revolution" against Andrii Yermak.

Yermak, sensing his own weakness and the danger he was in, especially in the light of the Mindich tapes, made a final desperate attempt to remove his rivals within the government who competed with him for influence over the president. They included Arakhamiia, Fedorov, and even Oleh Tatarov, Deputy Head of the President's Office, and Vasyl Maliuk, then head of the Security Service of Ukraine.

But after the tapes were released, the quiet hostility towards Yermak among the country's senior leadership quickly turned into an organised revolt. As NABU released its multi-episode investigation into corruption, an informal "revolutionary committee" was taking shape in offices all over the government quarter, with Fedorov, Arakhamiia and Kyrylo Budanov (then head of Defence Intelligence of Ukraine) its core members.

After 28 November, when NABU detectives passed through the checkpoint on Shovkovychna Street and arrived at Yermak's apartment, the anti-Yermak coup was complete. But Fedorov's role as an intermediary between the President's Office and the anti-corruption agencies would come back to haunt him.

No sooner had Yermak vacated his second-floor office than the race to succeed him as head of the President's Office began. Fedorov and Budanov emerged as the main contenders for the top job at Bankova Street.

Zelenskyy's final decision on his new chief of staff, as later became clear, was dictated by the fact that Fedorov had taken the word "reset" rather too seriously.

"Misha brought Zelenskyy a single list for the President's Office that contained all the reforms we had spent years pushing back against. So he was sent to the Ministry of Defence. Especially since he was the only one who had his own vision for the war," a source close to Zelenskyy explained at the time.

The problem was that that vision wasn't limited to drones and digitalisation. It also covered procurement, appointments, and ultimately the military command itself.

During Fedorov's first months in his new role, it looked as if the president's confidence in him would hold up. Pollsters argued that Zelenskyy had survived the first wave of the backlash after "Mindichgate" largely because he had surrounded himself with people who enjoyed strong public trust – above all Budanov and Fedorov. People trusted not so much the president himself as those around him whom they had always trusted.

But that had consequences too. In Bankova's informal classification system, Fedorov moved from "safe insider" to "insider rival". Budanov made no secret of his ambitions. Fedorov kept his out of sight, but everyone at Bankova was convinced he had them too.

And in the eyes of some in the political leadership, the fact that Fedorov had found common ground with the anti-corruption agencies during the crises and had helped break the deadlock made him a "Soros agent" and a "NABU torpedo" – labels that members of the team used to scare one another.

It was hardly surprising, then, that by spring 2026, relations between then commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and his defence minister had begun to cool.

"In the spring, I went to see the president and showed him what we were doing, what we were planning and which schemes we wanted to dismantle. He said: 'Do what your conscience tells you'," Fedorov reflects in conversation with UP. "I told him then that everyone would soon start coming to him and telling him how awful I was, so he should be ready for that. But I sensed there were problems from around April this year. Maybe even earlier.

Maybe they appointed me to the Defence Ministry so I would mess everything up there and they could sack me for it. Maybe that was the strategy too. But I believed I was appointed because there was a plan."

Officially Fedorov remained part of Zelenskyy's inner circle until summer 2026. In mid-June, he was one of six people who joined Zelenskyy at a private state residence outside Kyiv to discuss possible autumn elections and which generals should be talked out of running. It was Fedorov who pointed out to Zelenskyy that he had a chance of being re-elected, given the success of major strikes on Moscow and positive developments from Crimea and Donbas.

But by then, his presence at the meeting was already starting to look like the kind of situation where someone is kept at the table because it's easier to keep an eye on them that way. The idea of snap autumn elections was dropped after Zaluzhnyi and Budanov refused to rule out standing. By the end of July, Fedorov himself had more urgent concerns than Zelenskyy's re-election: it was decided to quietly drop the defence minister at a turning point in history.

On 12 July, Zelenskyy launched a government reshuffle. Svyrydenko was offered the post of ambassador to Washington. The president's preferred candidate for prime minister was Serhii Koretskyi, then CEO of Naftogaz Group, Ukraine's largest national oil and gas company.

For form's sake, Zelenskyy asked Fedorov whether he would be willing to head the government. Fedorov declined. He had joined the Defence Ministry only a few months earlier and was just getting started on his reforms.

But apparently even what he had managed to do in that short time had been enough to turn many influential people in the military command and among the country's arms industry powerbrokers against him.

In fairness, some of the criticism being directed towards the Defence Ministry's new team was justified.

Ihor Fedirko, executive director of the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry, told UP that after Fedorov took over, the ministry became a lot less willing to work even with specialist industry bodies such as his own.

"As soon as Mykhailo Fedorov became defence minister, the Defence Ministry's doors essentially slammed shut for associations and organisations like ours," Fedirko said. "We were ignored. I got the impression that a kind of closed Defence Ministry club had been created with powerful players from the defence industry market."

"The Ministry of Defence concentrated everything in its own hands: the drafting of requirements, tactical and technical specifications, procurement requests, and all the funding for new systems and innovations. All the key things, in other words. With all due respect, it's a total black box. It can't work like that. Can such a system be called effective? I don't know. But it certainly isn't transparent," he added.

According to Fedirko, another problem was the shift to competitive tenders – or, more precisely, the months of delay in defining tactical and technical specifications and procurement terms.

"Procurement through tenders didn't really begin until it was nearly September. The production cycle works like this: three months to order and deliver components, three months for assembly, and delivery has to happen by the end of the year. How is that supposed to be done? It's impossible. And this is now one of the biggest complaints about the Defence Ministry," Fedirko explained.

Ultimately, arms industry players had a lot of complaints about Fedorov's vision – some fairer than others. Often those complaints were the result of actions that had been taken with entirely good intentions.

One example was Fedorov's eagerness for the Defence Ministry itself to receive all international aid and control where and how the money was to be spent. While his team was auditing international agreements that had been concluded without the ministry's involvement, it missed out on signing a deal to purchase Patriot missiles. Zelenskyy, with good reason, erupted.

Fedorov tried to bend the system to fit his vision of the Defence Ministry and future warfare, causing controversies and inevitably making mistakes in the process. The system proved stronger.

Zelenskyy decided to use Fedorov's conflict with Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi as the excuse for firing him. Yet it was Fedorov's dismissal that seemed to be the most important thing – so much so that the entire government could be sacrificed to achieve it.

Among the politically engaged section of society, a perception took hold that in the battle between the "president of Mindiches" and the "president of reforms", the former had won. And people were not prepared to take that lying down.

A king is made by his court: Fedorov's team

The wider public is unaware of who (besides Fedorov himself) is responsible for building the Fedorov brand. The former minister's team has remained in the shadows.

Fedorov chooses his people according to the following principle: whoever knows a particular subject best is offered a position so powerful that it is impossible to turn down.

The core of Fedorov's team consists of experts from various fields. They have followed him from one ministry to another. Here we take a brief look at some of them.

Giorgi Tskhakaia

"In some ways Giorgi is even cooler than Mykhailo. Well-read, experienced. He understands technology – he's personally tested new types of weapons right in the combat zone. He's incredibly modest." That's how a source from Fedorov's team describes the key player.

From 2008 to 2011, Tskhakaia served in Georgia as deputy economy minister, head of the tax service and deputy mayor of Tbilisi. He was involved in developing virtually all the reforms carried out in the country.

After nine years in public service, he founded a consulting company in 2013. He worked in two dozen countries all over the world, from Uzbekistan to the United States, focusing on reforms in business, digitalisation and public services.

Tskhakaia came to Ukraine in 2015 at the invitation of Mikheil Saakashvili, then head of Odesa Oblast State Administration, to work on customs reform. He later worked as an expert at Saakashvili's Office of Simple Solutions and Results. That was where he met Fedorov.

After the full-scale invasion began, Fedorov asked Tskhakaia to help amend the legislation on import duties. Fedorov then offered him a position as his adviser. Together, they implemented the Army of Drones project, introduced e-points, and created Next, a special unit within the Brave1 defence tech cluster. [E-points are earned by Ukrainian units for confirmed strikes on Russian soldiers and equipment – ed.]

Oleksii Vyskub

If Fedorov is Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, as some members of his team see him, then Oleksii Vyskub is Master Yoda.

Vyskub trained as a specialist in computer systems and networks. He started out in the IT department at Dnipropetrovsk Oblast State Administration.

In 2015, he joined the State Agency for E-Governance, eventually becoming its first deputy head. He worked on developing and launching Ukraine's first electronic public services.

Vyskub first came to prominence as part of Fedorov's team in 2019, when the government appointed him first deputy minister of digital transformation. In this role, he was responsible for the development of Diia and government services.

After 24 February 2022, he worked on implementing the Army of Drones and Drone Line projects, as well as developing short-range air defence capabilities.

One of UP's sources in Fedorov's team says of Vyskub: "Oleksii is brilliant at managing projects. He's a technocrat. Although he's a civilian, he knows his way around military technology."

When Fedorov moved from the Ministry of Digital Transformation to the Ministry of Defence, Vyskub followed him, becoming first deputy defence minister, a position he still holds.

Ivan Turchak

Ivan Turchak is a lawyer by training and an expert on international law. In summer 2020, he became state secretary at the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Prior to that, he headed Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov's patronage service. Earlier still, he served as deputy head of Kyiv Oblast State Administration and director of Ukrposhta's Kyiv regional directorate.

Turchak moved to the Defence Ministry with Fedorov in January 2026 He is now the ministry's state secretary.

"The smartest person on the team," a source close to Fedorov says of Turchak. "He's the backbone of the team when it comes to legal work. Everyone would ask him when they needed to draft government resolutions so that the Cabinet of Ministers would end up adopting a working document and not something cobbled together like Frankenstein."

Choice Six. Be yourself

Scene: Kyiv – the US

Summary: How Fedorov almost fell in love with the Cardboard Maidan, but got a grip on himself and decided to launch a venture capital fund

There were no performances at Kyiv's Franko Theatre on 16 July 2026. The main events weren't taking place on stage, but in the square outside the theatre.

Two days earlier, the Verkhovna Rada had dismissed Yuliia Svyrydenko's government. It then emerged that the president had not put Fedorov forward for the post of defence minister. Protests erupted in Kyiv and other cities across the country, with calls to bring Fedorov back into government, demands for the dismissal of Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, and anger over the lack of transparency surrounding the president's reshuffle.

For the second time in a year, the defining feature of the protests were the cardboard signs with handwritten slogans. There was no little irony in the fact that the name of Ukraine's foremost digitalisation and innovation chief was being written in the most analogue medium. Older people, unlike most of the protesters, tend to associate cardboard not with the future but with the markets of the 1990s, when vendors would lay sheets of it on the ground for customers to stand on as they tried on shoes.

That same day, Fedorov held a press briefing where, among other things, he spoke about his conflict with Syrskyi and the General Staff's blocking of Defence Ministry decisions. The number of cardboard signs with Fedorov's name on visibly increased.

A few days later, his wife Anastasiia posted on Instagram, saying that she was "scared to live in a country where people can't stop at the point of being grateful for results and standing up for justice with dignity, and instead start to build an unhealthy cult of personality".

"She has a conflict of interest. She wants me all to herself," Fedorov jokes. "Being a Messiah is definitely not for me. We're at the point where people realise that something is going wrong. I explained to the president that people were not turning out for me. Everyone was exhausted, and he'd gone and taken away their hope. At that stage, that hope was associated with me."

Over the next few weeks, the biggest mystery was when Fedorov would make his appearance to the people. It wasn't until 6 August that he appeared outside the Franko Theatre, and even then it wasn't in person, but in digital form, on a large screen where a livestream with his adviser Serhii Sternenko was being shown. Fedorov assured the crowd that if he wasn't reinstated at the Defence Ministry, he had "Plan B, C, D and so on". He didn't give any details.

We ask Fedorov why he never once went to the square to join his followers.

"I was worried that if I went there and we realised that it was all real, we wouldn't have needed anyone else in this love affair," he jokes.

By the end of August, when it became clear that there would be no return to the Defence Ministry and that this love-in with street democracy was not going to end in a wedding, Fedorov recorded a video in which he made a much-publicised call for elections to be held during the war. Meanwhile, he avoided making any drastic moves or burning bridges. He insists that he is not fighting individuals, but the system (in which he himself had been a cog since 2019).

Fedorov believes that it is realistic to organise elections before the war ends – first presidential elections, followed by parliamentary ones.

"It was back in June that I suggested holding them. Zelenskyy was willing, but because Zaluzhnyi would have run [in the elections], he backed out. I told the president straight out: 'We need to hold elections because then you will stop thinking about them and start thinking about your legacy.' He asked: 'What's in it for you?' I replied: 'Victory in the war.'"

From talk of visions, we return to more earthly matters: has anyone approached Fedorov with an offer to invest in his political project since he began publicly pushing the idea of elections?

"I wouldn't say anyone has offered money, but there's been plenty of interest. I'm not imposing myself on anyone or looking for partners. For me, this is an important stage of my life, because it lets me see who is with me. Especially given how complicated the situation is. But one thing is certain: when I'm dying, I won't be regretting being afraid to do what I believe in."

The difficulty of Fedorov's situation is confirmed to UP by one of the top figures in the Ze!Team.

"He's seen as a political opponent by everyone except Zhelezniak and a few other MPs. The opposition sees Misha that way because he is effectively competing with Zaluzhnyi, whom Poroshenko planned to support. Batkivshchyna [the parliamentary faction led by Yuliia Tymoshenko] is against elections right now because for some reason they believe Yuliia's ratings will improve after the war. Servant of the People sees Misha as an opponent because he is against the president and all of us. So now he is a non-system opposition politician – he is against everyone."

In early September, Fedorov flew to the United States to seek out partners and finance for his venture capital fund. He plans to invest in several areas: sensorisation and robotisation of the front, interceptor drones, and low-cost missiles for air defence systems and attacks.

For now, he takes (or pretends to take) a philosophical view of the turbulent events of recent months and his dismissal.

"Maybe it's fate, you know, that we've been thrown out of government. If I'd been there, I wouldn't have had time to step back and look at everything that is happening. Right now I'd be having to advise the president on how to get the prosecutor general to come back to the country."

Asked which of his choices he currently considers the most difficult, he answers: "The choice is this: either leave, make a lot of money, come back to Ukraine, donate some money so that it looks like, you know, 'I'm with you, hang in there.' Or stay in Ukraine and try to raise some capital, but be under constant pressure from certain politicians and take a lot of hate. It's not easy, but it's what I want to do.

If I say that I choose Ukraine, that sounds a bit over-the-top, doesn't it?"

We've talked for several hours, and throughout the conversation Fedorov has repeated "The board will turn sooner or later" in various contexts, like a refrain. And he isn't just talking about his beloved chess. There's a sense that this thought is what sustains him most today.

Instead of an epilogue, or an open-ended finale

In late 2024, the Ministry of Digital Transformation was discussing the results of the year's work. Fedorov gave a motivational presentation. One of the slides featured a video montage from The Terminator – the one in which the main character is advised: "You gotta listen to the way people talk. You don't say 'Affirmative' or some shit like that. You say 'No problemo.' And if someone comes on to you with an attitude, you say 'Eat me.' And if you want to shine them on, it's 'Hasta la vista, baby.'"

Another famous Terminator quote is "I'll be back." What better slogan for a return to politics that Fedorov is currently strongly denying will happen?

His story is unfinished, which means it is unclear how he will emerge from it – as the biggest hope or disappointment of the year. A prophetic eccentric who, like the protagonist of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "at least tried", or yet another fallen star from the first iteration of the Ze!Team. Whether his visions of the future will inspire a frustrated public, and how this will affect his future trust rating, is a question for Veronika Feng Shui, although she definitely does not belong to Fedorov's universe, populated by AI-powered robots.

"Mykhailo has a different faith – robots," his assistant says before the photoshoot for this piece, as we stand on a Kyiv rooftop overlooking the silhouettes of neighbouring churches. It's hard to tell whether she is joking or serious.

Minutes later, against a background of golden domes, Fedorov eagerly dives into his favourite subject.

"I've come to the conclusion that we need a new Manhattan Project for robotic and fully autonomous means of warfare. AI and cheap drones will become the new nuclear deterrents. The war in Ukraine is the last war fought by humans – from now on, robots will be doing the fighting."

At certain moments when talking to Fedorov, he can seem crazy. But, as so often happens in life, many things turn out to be not what they seem.

Perhaps Fedorov's defining characteristic is his normality. For a top manager, whatever position they may hold in business or government, playing the long game is not madness, caring about your reputation is only natural, and keeping the state's purse separate from one's own is not an achievement. Providing, of course, that society is healthy and government is transparent (old people say they were once told about such things somewhere, some time ago).

And conversely, when normality is perceived as madness or an achievement, that is a system error that says a great deal not only about those on the political stage, but also about the people sitting in the audience.

In Fedorov's universe, two plus two always equals four (the corruption component doesn't feature), problems are new opportunities, Dead Souls is business literature, any phenomenon can easily be broken down into a ten-slide presentation, and the chessboard can be turned round at any time.

And even death can be hacked with the help of a well-timed dashboard.

Mykhailo Kryhel, Anhelina Strashkulych and Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Myroslava Zavadska, Tetiana Buchkovska, Ganna Bryedova and Anna Kybukevych

Edited by Teresa Pearce