Fedorov VS Syrskyi: a Black Swan for those in power

It appears that the wave of public outrage triggered by the dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and the military command's public response has every chance of becoming a black swan for those in power. The military held its breath: serving military personnel are bound by the chain of command and cannot express their views as freely as civilians. Civilians, meanwhile, are coordinating through their apartment-building group chats and coming out onto Ukraine's central squares in entire building groups.

In this story, Fedorov became an almost perfect contrast to the old-school military command of Soviet mould: young, technologically minded, hardworking, and untainted by corruption scandals. In his previous post, he made the state digital; at the Ministry of Defence, he launched changes from which society expected the most important thing — a shift from treating people as expendable material to treating them as the most valuable resource. His dismissal proved so unexpected, and the commander-in-chief's reaction so ill-judged, that within hours public irritation turned into a political wave. And that wave may well carry Fedorov far higher than those who decided to remove him from office had intended.

Where Fedorov's Strength Lies

I truly came to appreciate the digital state when, with a few taps, I restored my lost driving licence through Diia and ordered the plastic card for delivery to the nearest parcel locker. Today, in the same way and without a humiliating quest from office to office, one can obtain an extract or certificate, register a business, submit a marriage application, and arrange dozens of other documents. Anyone who remembers the circles of hell in Ukrainian government offices understands the scale of this breakthrough. Europe, for example, is decades behind Ukraine in digitalisation.

At the Ministry of Defence, Fedorov proposed the same thing — not a cosmetic refurbishment, but a change in the logic of the system. His team began introducing new contracts with fixed terms of service, clear rotation schedules, and incentive payments. For the first time in a long while, society began to hope that a mobilised person would not be treated as cannon fodder or a slave of the system. That is why the dismissal came as a bolt from the blue.

Syrskyi's Ultimatum

This article is a direct response to the commander-in-chief's post. Syrskyi did not merely sneer condescendingly at the word 'vision', which apparently grated on the ear of a graduate of the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. In a single post, he contrived to reduce the defence of the capital to his own command achievement. That was his public response to Fedorov's dismissal — and, disgracefully, comments under it were disabled as well.

Syrskyi did indeed command the defence of Kyiv, and it would be dishonest to deny his formal role. But commanding an operation does not confer the moral right to appropriate a collective victory. Kyiv held out thanks to the actions of regular units, independent decisions by individual commanders, the Territorial Defence Forces, volunteers, and thousands of civilians who, on 24 February, did not wait for orders from above but went to defend the city. The failure of Russian intelligence also played no small part: it had convinced its own command that people here would greet it virtually with the traditional bread-and-salt welcome.

I saw this defence from the inside. In the first days, only a handful of recruitment points accessible to ordinary people were effectively operating across Kyiv and its suburbs; one of them was our 130th Territorial Defence Battalion. People queued for several days; others reached Kyiv on foot to join the ranks. The state could issue Kalashnikov rifle and 120 rounds. Everything else — body armour, uniforms, food, and even drinking water — was sourced by volunteers. After Kyiv Oblast was liberated, the capital's Territorial Defence units were redeployed to the Kharkiv front, where yesterday's civilians already constituted a force numbering in the thousands. That is why the claim that the capital was supposedly defended by a single 'operation' led by one commander sounds not merely self-absorbed — it erases the contribution of the people who saved Ukrainian statehood.

This belittling of society's contribution and appropriation of others' achievements was not an accidental slip of the tongue. I heard similar claims in Germany, where officers from our General Staff told an international military audience how they had heroically 'organised the evacuation' from Bucha and Irpin. I think it would be superfluous to explain in this article what is wrong with that. Let us return, however, to our muttons.

It gets worse. Fedorov stated publicly that Syrskyi had blocked Ministry of Defence initiatives, avoided a direct conversation about the problems, and ultimately, in effect, issued an ultimatum. Zelenskyy kept the commander-in-chief and removed the minister. Which, in principle, is probably logical. But come on — ultimatums are for a wife who has discovered her husband's mistress. When the highest-ranking military officer of a country at war behaves this way, the question should not be about the minister, but about whether the commander-in-chief is fit for the post.

A Civilian Minister of Defence

If the minister of defence and the commander-in-chief cannot work together, the conflict really does have to be resolved. But not according to the principle of a military ultimatum. The minister does not have to be a general and does not compete with the commander-in-chief in the tactical command of troops. The minister's area of responsibility is policy, resources, procurement, institutional development, international engagement, and democratic civilian control. Ukraine's Law 'On National Security' explicitly requires legality, accountability, transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness in the security and defence sector. For NATO, civilian control likewise means that the military is accountable to the democratic government and parliament, not that the general officer corps is autonomous — this is set out in the Alliance's materials.

Public discussion of the command's effectiveness is therefore not an attack on the military, provided it does not disclose operational information or put service members at risk. Serving military personnel find it harder to speak because of the chain of command and the risks to their careers. I am speaking as a veteran and a researcher — precisely about what many serving officers cannot say aloud. And appointing security officials to an ever-growing number of civilian political posts is gradually leading us towards the kind of Chekist state from which we are supposedly fighting to distinguish ourselves.

Syrskyi and the Russian Flag

Syrskyi's official biography is well known: he graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School, as stated on the Ministry of Defence website. The mere fact of having studied in Moscow does not make someone a Russian agent, just as a Soviet military background does not automatically negate subsequent service to Ukraine. A large part of independent Ukraine's senior officer corps was shaped within the Soviet system: in the early 1990s, there simply was no other system. The question is different: to what extent was a person able to move beyond the school in which he was trained?

Soviet command culture means a rigid hierarchy, the concentration of decision-making at the top, a cult of orders, the primacy of mass over initiative, and the acceptance of heavy losses for the sake of formally completing a task. This is the origin of what is now called the 'meat grinder': repeated assaults, replacing loss analysis with fresh reinforcements, and viewing the soldier primarily as a resource. A commander of this generation must prove every day that he is capable of operating within a different system — one in which human life is not expendable material, but a strategic resource of the state. To forbid society from asking about the cost of military decisions merely because a war is under way is to preserve precisely the culture from which we seek to distinguish ourselves.

In my dissertation at the University of Bath, I examine how Russia turns subjugated peoples into instruments of subsequent wars. Chechnya — a country with a centuries-old tradition of resistance to the Russian Empire — was transformed, after two wars, into a militarised appendage of the Kremlin. Moscow delegated domestic violence to a loyal clan, destroyed independent institutions, rewrote the memory of resistance, created Kadyrov's personal army, and began using it in foreign wars.

During a lecture at the NATO School on the Russian way of war, I was asked about the prospects for Ukraine and Europe. My answer was unequivocal: if Ukraine loses or accepts 'peace' on Russia's terms, Ukrainians will arrive in Europe bearing arms within a few years. This is not an abstraction. In the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and in Crimea, Russia has already forcibly mobilised local residents; such cases have been documented by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and we saw them with our own eyes. Occupation is not merely the loss of land. It is the risk that the population of that land will be turned into a resource for the next act of imperial aggression.

I am therefore firmly convinced that, had the defence of Kyiv been entrusted solely to those who were supposed to be responsible for it, we would already be in Europe not as refugees, but under an entirely different flag.

A War of Resources or a War of Wits

Ukraine will not defeat Russia if it tries to become a smaller copy of it. Russia has more people, equipment, and ammunition, while the state is prepared to conceal losses for longer and drive society into a war of compulsion. In a symmetrical contest of attrition, the winner is the side that can keep feeding people and metal into the system for longer. Our strategy must therefore be asymmetric: technology, intelligence, automation, long-range strikes, digital command and control, rapid data exchange, logistical innovation, horizontal initiative, high-quality training, and preserving lives.

The contrast between a 'technologically minded civilian minister' and an 'experienced combat general' is itself false: Ukraine needs both sets of expertise. The problem begins when there is no shared vision of the war, no trust, and no clear division of powers, while an institutional conflict is resolved not through procedure but through intrigue and an ultimatum. Under such an arrangement, the state loses more than an official — it loses time, people, and the chance to fight more intelligently than the enemy.

Instead of an Afterword

And yet there is good news in this story: we still have powder left. A country exhausted by war, losses, and endless personnel games has not been struck dumb. People saw an attempt to roll back the changes — and rose up. Not for a party brand, not for a television messiah, but for the right to demand a modern military, respect for service members, and a clear strategy for victory. This public response proves that Ukraine is still politically alive and that those in power still cannot make us swallow just any decision with impunity.

After this story, Fedorov has every chance of making it to the presidency. He lacks only one thing — and Syrskyi inadvertently pointed to this shortcoming by mocking the word 'vision'. Fedorov speaks the language of the future: data, dashboards, ecosystems. If he learns to translate all of this into language the older generation can understand, he will become the favourite grandson of every grandmother in the country. And with their affection, he will gain precisely the votes he currently lacks to reach the presidential office.

Iryna Sergeeva, lecturer at the NATO School, veteran, University of Bath and the Marshall Center alumna