Why Ukraine’s military shake-up is really a fight over how to win the war
An unexpected upheaval in Ukraine’s military leadership has ended with the dismissal of both the defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, and the commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. The outcome is a victory for Fedorov’s camp: Syrskyi was replaced by Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, who is loosely aligned with the “faction” of the former defense minister and his allies. Much of Ukrainian society — which organized protests in support of Fedorov — and many analysts welcomed the outcome of the standoff. There is an understandable impulse to cast Fedorov as the embodiment of everything good in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and Syrskyi as the embodiment of everything bad. But the debate that spilled into public view reflects a deeper problem: Ukraine’s “theory of victory,” or the question of where to commit its finite resources in order to bring peace closer on Kyiv’s terms.
What was the Fedorov–Syrskyi dispute actually about?
The former defense minister held the post for barely six months — a period marked by the first clear battlefield successes for the Armed Forces of Ukraine in years. Fedorov had a hand in those successes in his earlier roles as first deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation, and he accomplished a great deal at the Defense Ministry too, not least persuading Elon Musk to cut off the smuggled Starlink terminals that had by then become the backbone of Russian military communications.
Beyond that, Fedorov — a former social media specialist from Volodymyr Zelensky’s team — managed to frame those successes as part of a coherent strategy. In his telling (more on this below), Ukraine needs to wage an “asymmetric war” built around drones of every type, from those that strike infantry in the tree lines near the front to those that hit oil refineries in Omsk.
Syrsky, who led Ukrainian forces through some of the war’s darkest stretches and most punishing operations, accumulated a string of missteps that came to overshadow his battlefield successes. At no point in the war did he offer a clear strategy for winning it — a task that often fell instead to Zelensky, who at times found himself explaining the rationale behind the military’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. Fedorov, in a presentation delivered after leaving his post, laid out those failures in detail.
- Fedorov described Syrskyi’s management style as excessively harsh and prone to micromanagement, with the commander-in-chief meddling in field commanders’ decisions and swapping out officers who disagreed with him for more compliant ones.
- Syrskyi favored an operational style that outraged military purists: he kept defending positions that were fully or partially encircled and ordered assaults to retake lost ground regardless of the state of his own forces or Russia’s. That approach never changed, even when shortening the front line would have been the more advantageous move.
- Syrskyi built a “personal guard” — assault regiments tasked with carrying out those counterattacks and plugging gaps in the defense. They suffered heavy casualties but received an outsized share of resources, including replacement troops, relative to their official strength. Some grew to the size of a division — that is, three times as many battalions as a regiment is supposed to have.
- In the public’s eyes, the commander-in-chief also bears responsibility for the forced mobilization system and its attendant problems: the territorial recruitment centers (TRCs) fall under his command.
- Finally, according to Fedorov, Syrskyi rejected or sabotaged reform plans proposed by the Defense Ministry, including those concerning how combat operations are organized at the front itself.
Because Syrskyi commanded the troops directly, Fedorov concluded that the commander-in-chief had to go. When Zelensky refused, Fedorov said he had agreed to keep working with Syrskyi.
A Meduza source close to the Ukrainian president’s office described the Fedorov–Syrskyi conflict as a clash of two approaches: one reformist and humane, if somewhat removed from the realities of war; the other “a Soviet-style general’s approach.” “If Fedorov was pushing the drone-assault troops concept, Syrsky is widely seen as an ‘assault general’ who sees only one path forward: infantry assaults,” the source said.
The same source also said Ukrainians have grown tired of the scandals surrounding forced mobilization and of investigations into abuses in the military — above all the investigation by the Ukrainian news outlet Babel into violations of service members’ rights in the assault regiments. “Syrsky became a symbol of the idea that life for young Ukrainians will only get harder, because the harsh, forcible mobilization will continue,” the source said. The view has taken hold in Ukrainian society, the source said, that the former commander-in-chief “deliberately doesn’t change TRC staff — on the contrary, they’re being pushed to work as harshly as possible.”
“Young professionals, managers, IT workers who don’t want to fight and don’t understand how the war works, who aren’t looking ahead to the prospect of possible mobilization in Russia — they saw Fedorov’s dismissal, with Syrsky staying on, as a nightmare. For them it meant that sooner or later everyone would really have to fight,” the source said.
A Meduza source in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, explained the public’s discontent with Syrskyi this way: “Nobody is eager to fight at this stage of the war. And yet in Ukraine you can just as easily get a deferment working in the police as, say, working as a propagandist on the state ‘Telemarathon.’ A lot of people find that outrageous.”
Syrskyi answered Fedorov’s accusations with a brief column offering point-by-point explanations and counteraccusations:
- He did not present a victory strategy to the public because it must be kept secret from Russia.
- The commander-in-chief, he wrote, fights around the clock, while his critics are good only at giving presentations.
- It was he, Syrskyi — not Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov — who was behind the creation of the Unmanned Systems Forces, the world’s first military branch dedicated to drones, and who chose their commander, Robert Brovdi (Madyar), whose candidacy “many opposed.” He also worked to integrate drones into the broader force so they could support combined-arms operations alongside infantry, artillery, and engineers — because drones alone cannot win a war, let alone carry out the offensive operations the country needs for victory.
- Finally, he fought abuses in the TRCs but could not overhaul the system: reform plans are drafted by the Defense Ministry and approved by parliament.
According to a Meduza source close to Zelensky’s office, Fedorov alienated the generals under Syrskyi’s command by trying to impose civilian oversight on military procurement from the defense industry. “It’s understandable that such ideas met with deep resistance from the generals — not least because they reduced opportunities for corruption. On the other hand, generals are generals for a reason. And then some IT kid shows up and starts telling them what to do. At that point it’s purely personal,” the source said.
Much of the conflict stems from personal animosity, as well as from a murky division of roles and responsibilities at the top of Ukraine’s defense establishment. But the most important part of the disagreement is conceptual, not merely stylistic. Ukraine faces an acute question: how to preserve and build on the technological and tactical advantages it has recently gained — and, above all, how to convert them into peace on acceptable terms. That is, into victory.
What might victory, or defeat, look like for Ukraine?
Game theory applied to how wars end — an approach that draws on the limited empirical record of past conflicts — holds that parties go to war without full information about the balance of forces, in order to seize resources ranging from trade advantages to an adversary’s sovereignty over a piece of territory. Combat is the process of acquiring that information. War aims can shift as the data come in. Each side’s understanding of the balance is shaped not only by victories and defeats at the front but also by the actions of allies, the state of the economy and society, and so on. Once the likely outcome becomes clear to both sides, the war ends.
Compared with 2022, Moscow’s and Kyiv’s understanding of the possible — and even desirable — outcomes has changed substantially. Vladimir Putin’s ambition to replace Ukraine’s government with a puppet regime, seize most of the country’s territory, and dictate its policies — if he still holds it — is no longer backed by realistic scenarios. Ukraine’s optimism about liberating the country within its 1991 borders has likewise faded. Through the end of 2024, the two sides traded maximalist demands, but the start of negotiations mediated by Donald Trump forced them to search for more realistic “theories of victory.”
Putin’s stated condition is a ceasefire in the “spirit of Anchorage” — a reference to his informal understanding with Trump, reached in August 2025, on an “exchange of territories.” The Kremlin has stubbornly refused to spell out the details of that “spirit,” but according to numerous leaks, Putin demanded, through Trump, that Zelensky hand over the remaining Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; in the Zaporizhzhia region, control would be fixed along the line of contact. If Zelensky refused — and he soon did — Putin threatened to seize the rest of the Donbas by force and, as a bonus, take whatever territory in the Zaporizhzhia region his army had managed to occupy by then.
Those words need not be taken at face value. It is entirely possible that Putin is harboring plans to continue the war even after the “spirit of Anchorage” becomes reality. And guarantees against a resumption of the war would be no easier to negotiate than the “exchange” itself — that is, Ukraine’s surrender of its own sovereign territory.
Yet the Kremlin’s medium-term plans can be reconstructed from its actions. Russian forces are doggedly pressing a concentric advance on the Kramatorsk–Sloviansk urban area, which is nearly all the territory the Armed Forces of Ukraine still hold in the Donetsk region. Russia’s military leadership faced a choice: advance on Kramatorsk, or attempt a far riskier lunge toward Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, decisive if it succeeded. It chose the Donbas.
That choice came in early 2025, just as the operation to capture the southern part of the Donetsk region was wrapping up. A powerful Russian grouping positioned to advance on Dnipro through weakened Ukrainian defenses was not only denied reserves but actually cut down in size: an entire combined-arms army of two divisions was pulled away from it. That army was sent to the front south of Kramatorsk — a move that eventually allowed Russian forces to capture Pokrovsk and push into the center of Kostiantynivka.
A division from the Kherson region — a force that could otherwise have advanced on Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro from the south, along the Dnipro River — was later sent to the Kramatorsk area as well, along with troops from the border of the Kursk and Sumy regions.
Putin’s own choices thus confirm that his aim is the full occupation of the Donbas rather than the far less realistic goal of crushing Ukraine as an independent state.
What exactly Putin believes this “victory” will bring him is hard to say; the Kremlin’s real intentions remain largely opaque. At home, the capture of the Donbas can presumably be “sold” as a decisive achievement — state propaganda has been priming the public for that framing. For Kyiv, presenting such an outcome as a victory, or even as “not a defeat,” will be difficult: it will have lost the Donbas anyway, at a far higher cost than surrendering the region would have carried. Putin may well be counting on this to trigger a political crisis in Ukraine and hand him leverage over the country after the war.
Many analysts believe the Kremlin’s real plan is not to seize territory but to wage a grinding war of attrition until Ukraine exhausts its resources and its allies lose the will to support it — after which Russian forces would achieve a decisive breakthrough and crush the opposing army. But the entire course of the war so far suggests this scenario is unlikely in the medium term. Nor is the Kremlin trying to hasten its enemy’s exhaustion at any cost: Russia — its economy and its society — remains far less mobilized for the war than Ukraine. Russia, in short, is not fighting the war of attrition at full strength.
In response to the Anchorage plan, Ukraine declared that it would accept a ceasefire freezing the zones of control along the current front line. For that to happen, Putin must be convinced that his plan for victory cannot be realized — which would be tantamount to his defeat.
Ukraine can get there in more than one way, or through some combination of them. The most direct path is a reliable halt to the Russian advance in the Donetsk region, which a successful Ukrainian offensive there — or a series of them — could deliver. The alternatives are longer routes to winning a war of attrition against an adversary with a resource advantage. Every one of them requires Ukraine to gain a decisive edge in effectiveness, since its resources are smaller.
And over the past year, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have made real progress: drone strikes at the front and counterattacks have increased Russian casualties and made Russia’s old offensive tactics extremely difficult — even infiltration by small infantry groups, let alone assaults by full mechanized units. Ukraine has shown it can disrupt Russian logistics across vast swaths of occupied territory with drone strikes on Russia’s middle rear — the belt running from about 12 to more than 60 miles behind the line of contact. Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, even if they have not matched Russia’s in total explosive payload, have at times done more damage, because of the targets Ukraine picked. And after a long pause that began in the summer of 2024, Ukrainian forces have returned to conducting relatively large offensive operations — on the scale of an army corps.
All of this raises the cost of the war for Russia and slows its army’s advance. It also buys Ukraine something harder to count: better morale in the army and in society. Beyond boosting trust in the government, that can directly affect other resources — for instance, by reducing the number of service members who go absent without leave.
From these successes — most of them tied to drones — Fedorov assembled his “theory of victory”:
- Increase pressure on the Russian economy and on public opinion through painful strikes on poorly defended facilities in key industries.
- Simultaneously disrupt supplies to the occupied territories with strikes on logistics.
- At the front, use drone strikes to inflict a level of irrecoverable losses — soldiers killed or wounded too severely to return to duty — that Russia cannot offset by recruiting new contract soldiers (currently around 30,000 per month).
Fedorov said little in detail about Ukraine’s offensive capabilities, proposing only the creation of drone-assault troops for that purpose. That was likely one of the sticking points in his contentious meetings with Syrskyi and Zelensky. The public was offered a simpler version: if Russia cannot replace its army’s losses, its offensive will stall on its own. In the winter, Fedorov — along with Zelensky and Brovdi — said the threshold had been reached in December, and that the next benchmark was 50,000 irrecoverable losses per month.
The casualty figures cited by Fedorov and other military and government officials have drawn skepticism. Reliable independent estimates of the number killed can be produced only with a lag of several months; data on losses from the first quarter of the year will become available in a few weeks. Before his own dismissal, though, Syrskyi hinted broadly that Fedorov’s estimates did not match his: in an interview with The Times of London, he said the Russian grouping at the front had not shrunk since the start of the year but had actually grown slightly.
In retrospect, Zelensky’s office had its own objections to Fedorov’s plan. The president’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, said in late May that the war cannot be won with drones alone — that drones “are not the main weapon, but a support.” The reason for Fedorov’s dismissal was likely not only political friction and personal distrust on Zelensky’s part, as former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has claimed, but also these conceptual disagreements. For years, though, Zelensky had backed not just Syrskyi personally but his way of waging war.
Holding even hopeless positions and mounting counterattacks probably served Zelensky’s political purposes well: Ukrainian society is highly sensitive to territorial losses. Syrskyi, for his part, did not want to limit himself to defense; he remained a consistent advocate of large, decisive offensives capable of achieving strategic objectives. He had long pushed to increase the number of brigades, but personnel and equipment shortages all but halted that effort. The commander-in-chief was apparently trying to work around those shortages by expanding his “guard” — the assault troops.
Syrskyi’s longtime rival, former Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, weighed in along the same lines as Budanov, in language blunter still. Without naming Fedorov, he said the plan “goes beyond the bounds of common sense” and identified the core problem as “the impossibility of mounting an offensive” amid widespread drone use.
Fedorov’s plan is grounded in real successes, but the central question is whether it leads to victory. Russian casualties are rising and the pace of the advance is slowing. Economic trouble is deepening. Antiwar sentiment appears to be growing, though there is no measuring it under current conditions. None of that is decisive, though. What decides the war is Putin’s conviction that he can adapt to these difficulties and win his “victory” all the same. Only Ukrainian successes on the battlefield can change his mind. Air campaigns, however effective, have almost never succeeded on their own — least of all when the ground fighting delivers setbacks rather than matching gains.
So far, the Kremlin has shown no inclination toward compromise in response to effective Ukrainian strikes. Russian forces are already responding in kind: they have launched a large-scale campaign of their own against gas stations and fuel depots, previously only sporadic targets; they are working to disrupt logistics in Ukraine’s middle rear; and they are striking cargo ships sailing from Ukraine across the Black Sea. Russia’s Defense Ministry has announced an ambitious — and unrealistic — plan for defenses against Ukrainian drones. At the front, Russian forces use nearly as many drones as Ukraine does — which, as Zaluzhnyi said, deprives Ukraine of the ability to mount effective offensives. Finally, the Kremlin has sent its propagandists talking points urging the public to endure, because victory, they are to say, is near.
The obvious conclusion is that even if Fedorov’s plan does not deliver a swift victory outright, it moves Ukraine toward the result it needs — and that sooner or later, simply by scaling up these efforts, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will break Putin’s will. That would be true if Ukraine had the resources. But the country’s time is not unlimited: its planning horizon runs about a year and a half, to the point when the European Union’s credit line of 90 billion euros expires. Western assistance to Kyiv will likely continue past that point, but its terms and scale are impossible to predict now.
Other finite resources could be spent differently than Fedorov’s plan envisions. The target benchmarks for driving up Russian losses are not merely aspirational: they are backed by a concrete incentive to expend drones — and their operators’ effort — on a single category of targets. The incentive works through the “E-points” system, which awards bonuses to military personnel for confirmed strikes on targets. Fedorov introduced it while he was still running the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Officers fighting at the front confirm as much. They also say the incentive to prioritize killing Russian troops conflicts with other missions — chiefly supporting Ukrainian units on the ground and conducting combined-arms operations.
The distribution of medium-range drones across sectors also raises questions. Most of their strikes land on supply routes leading to occupied Crimea; far fewer reach the Russian army’s rear in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet the road from the Rostov region to Crimea along the coast of the Sea of Azov — where most of those targets have been struck — supplies only Russia’s “Dnepr” grouping, which had halted its advance toward Zaporizhzhia even before the middle-rear strike campaign began. If the attacks are not followed by a major Ukrainian offensive toward Crimea or the Azov coast, the purely military — as opposed to political — effect of “isolating Crimea” will not amount to much.
Finally, in his farewell column, Syrskyi accused Fedorov of juggling resources to fund the drone plan: Fedorov, he said, boosted current drone deliveries to the army by dipping into money earmarked for soldiers’ pay in the second half of the year.
What about Drapatyi? Can he fix everything?
Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43, is a young but highly experienced commander who has served both in operational roles at the General Staff and in field commands. Every one of those posts carried less responsibility than the job he is taking on now. His experience is thinnest in setting overall war strategy.
Like any active commander, Drapatyi has a record of successes and mistakes. After repelling the Russian advance in the Kharkiv region in the summer of 2024, he was appointed commander of the Ground Forces in November 2024 — a role that put him in charge of the TRC system, tasked with curbing “excesses” in mobilization. Without leaving that post, in January 2025 he also took command of “Khortytsia,” then the largest grouping in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, responsible for defending the Donbas along a front stretching from the Kharkiv region to the Dnipropetrovsk region. In that capacity he organized the counterstrikes on the outskirts of Pokrovsk that halted the Russian advance toward the city. But he later failed to anticipate both the start of the Russian offensive in May 2025 and the direction of its main thrust, in the sector between Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka. In June he was removed from his posts — formally, he resigned after a Russian strike on a Ukrainian training ground caused heavy casualties — and in October he was transferred to command a new grouping in the Kharkiv region.
Even before that, Drapatyi had developed a system for integrating drones into combined-arms operations. The goal was to restore Ukraine’s ability to go on the offensive — not merely to organize local counterattacks, but to conduct maneuver warfare aimed at smashing the Russian army along significant stretches of the front. In October 2025, the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think tank, published a report in which anonymous Ukrainian officers described a new offensive concept: a long reconnaissance phase cataloging key Russian assets at the front — drone crews, artillery, infantry, electronic warfare systems, everything that impedes an advance — followed by their simultaneous destruction and a rapid Ukrainian push. According to those sources, the offensive that Drapatyi’s grouping launched near Kupiansk that same month was organized along exactly those lines.
The future commander-in-chief fulfilled an important political mission there: Putin had boasted to Trump that Russia had captured Kupiansk, but the Armed Forces of Ukraine drove the Russian army from the city center, inflicting heavy losses. Syrskyi’s assault regiments were attempting similar missions in the Zaporizhzhia region, at far greater cost. In both cases, the offensives proved too slow and too shallow. That allowed Russian forces to regroup and, in the south, to bring in reserves from the Donbas to blunt the advance. Ukrainian troops are still attacking there, however.
Nine months on, Drapatyi’s offensive near Kupiansk looks less impressive than its opening did. He drew heavily on his own grouping’s forces — including drone operators — redeploying them from the Vovchansk area. Russian forces took advantage of the weakened Ukrainian defense there and pushed Ukrainian troops out of Vovchansk, which Ukraine had held since the summer of 2024. Around Kupiansk, Russian troops regrouped and resumed their advance, reaching the city center once again. In the eastern half of the city, beyond the Oskil River, and in neighboring settlements, Russian forces broke the Ukrainian defense into pieces, seizing a large area and threatening to encircle every unit still east of the river.
Some of Drapatyi’s mistakes can plausibly be chalked up to a shortage of forces and to interference from Syrskyi, whose micromanagement was the central charge against him. But now the general will face similar problems at a new level of responsibility: he will be handed political directives to hold positions, and resources will still fall short.
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The “Explainer” desk with contributions from Elizaveta Antonova