For more than a month, demonstrators have gathered in Ivan Franko Square outside Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. The protesters have been chanting a name – not that of Ukraine’s embattled president but that of the man he recently sacked as defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. On Sunday evening, 2,000 people marched along Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main boulevard, waving cardboard banners in support of their ousted hero.
Zelenskyy has refused to reinstate Fedorov, who during his six months in the job was widely seen as an effective and reforming figure. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, voted to approve a successor as defence minister, Yevhen Khmara. The move shows that Fedorov has been shut out from government permanently, and confirms his transition from trusted insider and Zelenskyy loyalist to a potent political opponent.
On Tuesday, Fedorov released on YouTube a bombshell nine-minute video. In it, the 35-year-old called for wartime elections and reminded Zelenskyy, his former boss, that power ultimately resided with the people. The country was facing a “systemic crisis of governance”, he said, in which corruption inside the defence ministry was hurting the war effort.
Reforms were stymied, loyalists promoted. It is scared of change,” he said, hinting that his own attempts to root out corruption in procurement had led to his sacking. Most civil society activists agree with this big-picture analysis.
Corruption has always existed in Ukraine, in common with other countries that were once a part of the Soviet Union, including and especially Russia. During the 2010-14 presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by the Kremlin, it reached spectacular levels. In the peaceful past, large-scale theft from the state budget left less money for schools and hospitals.
As Fedorov noted, today’s schemes have “an entirely different meaning” as full-scale war rages. They represent drones not bought, “ammunition that did not reach the front” and technology that “could have been put into production but wasn’t”. The video shows a photo of Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff, who resigned last year amid a corruption scandal implicating other senior figures such as Timur Mindich, Zelenskyy’s former business partner.
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