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Ukrainians marched for a month to get Mykhailo Fedorov his job back as defense minister. Then he released a video calling for elections, and the crowds stopped coming.
Source: Meduza
Anatolii Stepanov / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA
In mid-August, a video address by former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov caused an uproar in Ukraine. In it, Fedorov argued that Ukraine needs to hold elections despite the war and spoke about corruption inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s team. Many Ukrainians, including Fedorov’s own supporters, have called the statements a misstep and criticized him sharply. Zelensky has already said that elections during the war would be a “tsunami that would split Ukraine apart.”
A source close to the Ukrainian President’s Office acknowledged to Meduza that Fedorov’s ratings have risen far enough that in an election he could be a strong rival to Zelensky and Valery Zaluzhny, the former commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Meduza explains what is known about Fedorov’s political intentions and how his ambitions are playing out in Ukrainian society and within the government.
Why everyone is suddenly talking about Mykhailo Fedorov
On August 18, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov posted a video to his YouTube channel that he called an “address to the people.” It went up the day before Yevhen Khmara was appointed to lead the defense ministry, and after more than a month of protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities by supporters demanding Fedorov’s reinstatement.
It was the first video on the channel, which Fedorov had created that same day.
In the address, the former defense minister took up a subject that is taboo in Ukraine: elections. Ukraine last voted in presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019; subsequent votes were canceled under the martial law imposed in 2022.
Fedorov said Russia had effectively acquired “the right to determine when Ukrainians will once again be able to choose their government”:
Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia. We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state. That is why we must find a legal, safe, and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to resume a fully functioning democratic process even amid a prolonged war.
Fedorov did not specify whether he meant presidential or parliamentary elections.
What do Ukrainians think about holding elections during the war?
There is broad consensus in Ukrainian society that presidential elections should be postponed until the war ends. According to the results of a March 2026 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, only 12% of Ukrainians think elections should be held before the fighting stops.
Not even Volodymyr Zelensky’s political rivals raise the subject in public.
Valery Zaluzhny — the former commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, now the country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, and until recently described as the opposition’s unity candidate — has yet to say openly that he plans to run for president. He insists that talk of voting is premature until martial law is lifted.
Ukrainian election-law expert Olha Aivazovska, responding to Fedorov’s statement on Facebook, also came out against holding elections in a country at war without the necessary preparations for an electoral process:
I see hundreds of possible scenarios the Russians could use to delegitimize the electoral process or halt it altogether. It would be a complete collapse. I agree with Fedorov that the Russians shouldn’t be the ones deciding when we hold elections, because if they could, elections would have happened long ago. …
But I am firmly against holding elections to serve someone’s political interests, without regard for the real state of the infrastructure, an analysis of the risks, and proper preparation.
Fedorov also turned to corruption in government, which he said “takes on an entirely different meaning” in wartime. In peacetime, he said, stolen money means deteriorating roads, hospitals, and schools; in wartime it means the front goes short of drones, ammunition, and the military vehicles without which the wounded cannot be evacuated.
Mykhailo Fedorov
Fedorov also said Ukraine has a “systemic crisis of governance,” one in which the political system “too often lives by its own rules.” He did not name anyone he holds responsible for the corruption or the governance crisis, but as he spoke of the “old political system,” the video cut to portraits of former President’s Office head Andriy Yermak and David Arakhamia, who leads the Servant of the People faction in the Verkhovna Rada.
The day after the video went up, an unnamed source in Zelensky’s office told the British broadcaster BBC News: “It’s extremely strange to plan elections amid missile and drone attacks. This demonstrates a complete lack of realism.”
Why Fedorov chose to make his address now
Fedorov’s address was an attempt to “enter politics,” a source close to the President’s Office told Meduza: “In essence, he laid out a political program in three points: replacing Zelensky in order to fight the war more effectively, fighting corruption (which, as he sees it, requires removing Zelensky), and uniting”:
I think Misha sincerely wants to achieve these goals. He’s very goal-oriented. And he has a personal motive: his home village, Vasylivka in the Zaporizhzhia region, is under Russian occupation.
A Ukrainian politician called it “quite logical” that the address was released now: “Talks [with the President’s Office about returning as defense minister] didn’t work out, so he’s taken the fight into politics.” The problem, the source continued, was that the President’s Office had expected “something livelier” from Fedorov. “He could have announced his own political platform and called supporters out to a series of rallies,” the source in Kyiv said. “Instead he put out media content.”
Four days after the video appeared, Zelensky again addressed Fedorov’s dismissal in comments to Ukrainian journalists. The president repeated that a “very serious” conflict had arisen between Fedorov and Oleksandr Syrskyi, then the commander in chief, over the division of authority between the defense ministry and the military command. As a result, Zelensky said, the two men stopped speaking directly and discussed matters only at meetings in the president’s office.
The president stressed that after deciding to replace the defense ministry’s leadership, he had offered Fedorov different ways of working on the team four times, and that Fedorov had turned down every one. Fedorov had said he would return only as head of the ministry.
Bringing Fedorov back to his old post was impossible — the risks to the system would have been too high, a source close to the President’s Office told Meduza. “The ‘cardboard people’ won’t start liking us again, whether or not Fedorov got his job back,” the source said. Many Ukrainians associate government embezzlement with the president’s name, the source said, and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) is still pursuing its investigations.
“Cardboard people” is the dismissive term the source close to the President’s Office uses for the protesters supporting Fedorov.
So why are they "cardboard"?
Rallies in support of Fedorov began on July 16, the day after his dismissal. They became known as “cardboard” protests because his supporters turned up with slogans written on pieces of cardboard.
“The defense minister is being removed in the middle of effective (finally!) reforms and replaced by someone under whom you can forget about any reforms,” war veteran Dmytro Koziatynskyi wrote on social media. In July 2025, Koziatynskyi had been one of the leaders of the “cardboard” protests in defense of the independence of NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). He urged fellow protesters to gather at Franko Square in central Kyiv.
“Bring your cardboard signs, and remember this is a peaceful protest,” he said.
Protesters carried signs reading “Bring back Fedorov,” “The problem isn’t Fedorov,” “Fedorov is our hope for reform,” and “Don’t break what works.”
Rallies took place daily in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, with the largest turnout in late July. The Kyiv Independent and the news agency Reuters both counted “thousands” of participants in the “march for dialogue and reforms in defense” in Kyiv on July 31.
How Ukrainians reacted to Fedorov’s address
Fedorov’s speech left many of his supporters and Ukrainian journalists baffled. As soon as the video went online, his press service sent the link to its private chat with reporters, according to a Meduza source who belongs to that chat. The journalists, the source said, asked the press service to explain which elections Fedorov meant and what his point was in the first place.
Members of the chat found the video absurd; one wrote that “there will be a lot of memes.” Sure enough, “within a couple of hours the entire Ukrainian segment of social media was flooded with memes,” the Meduza source said with a chuckle. Many of the source’s colleagues recalled, in private conversations, an old video featuring the line “The wording’s kind of moronic,” which has since become a catchphrase. It shows the Kharkiv politicians Hennadiy Kernes and Mykhailo Dobkin recording an address to the city’s residents in 2007. Journalists who know Fedorov compared him to Dobkin and dubbed the former defense minister “Misha No. 2.”
A Ukrainian political commentator told Meduza the video address was “cringe”:
He’s sitting there at a desk looking grim, a lamp shining, the whole thing staged. In real life, he’s game for anything and improvises everything. But here it’s 10 iffy, canned minutes set to gloomy music, plenty of words about being for everything good and against everything bad.
He says we need to look for tools to hold elections. Well, yes, we do. How long have we been saying that … We need to guarantee democracy — well, sure. But it’s all generalities that are really hard to tie to any actual goal. What was the point of it?
The commentator also faulted Fedorov for “criticizing the old system”: “Never mind that you spent seven years in that system yourself? You only noticed all this once you stopped being part of it?”
He was also puzzled that Fedorov, “beginning his political story” and effectively announcing his readiness to move into opposition to Zelensky, “didn’t name him or even show him in the video,” limiting himself to photographs of Yermak and Arakhamia. The commentator suspects the former defense minister wants to “have it both ways.”
The commentator said Fedorov used the video, in effect, to accuse Arakhamia of corruption and of defending his own financial interests: “When he spoke about corruption and the harm to the country, it was Arakhamia who appeared on screen.” Some outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda, have described the head of the pro-presidential faction in the Verkhovna Rada as the principal organizer of the scheme to reshuffle the cabinet, under which Fedorov was to “disappear from the government,” the commentator said.
Fedorov draws support from some Ukrainian journalists and human rights advocates, as well as from young people and a “middle class that wants to see justice done” — groups that are sharply opposed to corruption, a source close to the President’s Office told Meduza.
Supporters of Mykhailo Fedorov at a rally in Kyiv. August 19, 2026.
Gleb Garanich / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA
“These ‘cardboard people’ are unhappy with how tightly power is centralized in the Ukrainian president’s hands, and they believe parliamentary elections would produce a new Verkhovna Rada, in which the existing single-party majority [of the Servant of the People party] would give way to a coalition,” he said. Zelensky would then have to negotiate with coalition partners, and the political process would become more democratic again. That, the source said, is the protesters’ logic.
Fedorov has worked with the political strategists Dmytro Tsarenko and Viktor Berezenko since his time at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, the source said. Ahead of the 2019 elections, the pair oversaw several Servant of the People lawmakers, and from early 2021 until July 2022 they even ran Zelensky’s social media accounts.
The strategists themselves confirmed in December 2024 that they were working with Fedorov. “It looks like [now] they decided the message about elections would land well with his audience. The idea that elections need to happen appeals to them. Misha took it [as the basis for his address]. But they screwed up a little here — in the end Misha turned a lot of people against himself and effectively narrowed his circle of supporters,” the Ukrainian politician said.
The political commentator believes “Fedorov’s team hit the post” — that is, they fell short of their audience’s expectations. “How could this be? Fedorov has an enormous following of young, progressive, creative people. How could they put out this shit? And why did nobody stop him at any point?” he lamented:
Even many of the people who had supported Fedorov until now are disappointed in him and stunned. As in: we came out for you, we backed you, and this is the shit you produced. After all, most of Ukrainian society believes elections during wartime are unacceptable.
Koziatynskyi, one of the main organizers of the pro-Fedorov protests, responded to the former defense minister’s video on Facebook. He thanked “everyone who came out to the protests” for helping secure the removal of Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander in chief and his replacement with Mykhailo Drapatyi.
Koziatynskyi said the main reason for the rallies, as he saw it, was the absence of communication between Ukrainian society and the authorities. For him, he said, “these protests were about dialogue and reforms, not about specific individuals.” On the idea of holding elections he was blunt:
I can’t imagine how you would technically make it possible for thousands of service members now on the front line to vote and to run for office. I’m also very worried about divisions in society during an electoral process, and about how that could affect the course of the war. In any case, street protest is definitely not the place for campaign discourse.
For his part, Oleksiy Sorokin, a political commentator at The Kyiv Independent, believes Fedorov put his political ambitions above the interests of the state.
“Zelensky himself is destroying the public support he’s had since 2022, because of self-centered decisions, corruption scandals, personnel policy, and the concentration of power. Should he lose the next election? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean elections should be held now,” Sorokin said.
An independent Ukrainian political commentator who spoke with Meduza suggests Fedorov’s statement was meant to “stir up” the protests in his support. It didn’t work: only 100–150 people came to the Verkhovna Rada building on August 19, he said. (On July 31, Reuters correspondents had counted “thousands” of demonstrators in Kyiv.)
“After the deputies voted [to appoint Yevhen Khmara on August 19], the protesters said they’d gather outside the President’s Office that evening. Even fewer people came,” he continued. “The protests are winding down, and I think Fedorov’s statement sped up that process.”
More lawmakers voted to confirm Khmara that day than protesters gathered outside the Rada, a source close to the President’s Office said snidely.
How Fedorov’s team tried to explain what he meant in his video
In the days that followed, Fedorov made several more statements clarifying his position.
On August 21, Ukraine’s Channel 24 aired a long interview with the former defense minister, in which he clarified that he had not called for elections to be held urgently. The address, he said, was about carefully preparing electoral legislation with “the best experts in Ukraine and the world” — people he says he is “already in close touch with.”
He also said he meant parliamentary, presidential, and local elections alike. “What the sequence will be is a question for discussion with various experts,” Fedorov said.
Asked whether he would run for president, the former defense minister said he would know himself once the country was ready to hold elections.
A source close to the President’s Office believes Fedorov’s team “quickly understood that they had chosen the wrong message to begin with, and clarified that they meant not a blitzkrieg [that is, an immediate election] but a long, systemic fight” with Zelensky’s team.
In the same interview, Fedorov said he plans to set up a venture fund that will draw Western money into Ukrainian startups — for example, in producing inexpensive ballistic missiles and in the “robotization of the front line.” He also intends to create a think tank that will “generate ideas” about how to win the war and offer them to the government. And he wants to take on “civic work connected with preparing the country for the return of democracy.”
Fedorov told journalists he would soon travel to the United States for several meetings aimed at attracting investment in Ukrainian military technology projects, though he did not say whom he planned to meet.
Asked by Channel 24 whether he planned to line up the American president’s support before the elections, Fedorov said no. He stressed that discussing such questions is “Ukraine’s homework.”
Fedorov has continued making statements that appear designed to give Ukrainians a sense of his political program. On August 25, asked by Reuters journalists about Ukraine’s prospects in the war, he said: “I think there’s now a turning point that will determine our future trajectory [in the war], but it looks as though we’re gradually, slowly losing.”
What Zelensky’s team risks because of Fedorov’s public activity
Fedorov will decide which elections to contest as the situation develops, the source close to the President’s Office suggested. In the source’s view, it is still premature to talk about elections in Ukraine at all. An independent Ukrainian journalist agrees: “We really don’t know when there will be elections, and Fedorov could still flame out as a politician 150 times over.”
The 35-year-old former defense minister represents a new generation of opposition figures in Ukrainian politics, the Meduza source said. Unlike Valery Zaluzhny — who criticizes the authorities but is still officially part of the president’s team — Fedorov opposes Zelensky openly. Now, a Ukrainian official is convinced, Fedorov “will keep Zelensky’s team on edge”:
Fedorov still has a chance to fix this failure [with the video address] somehow. It will all depend on what he does next: whether he backs up his words with actions and highlights his strengths, or just goes on shooting little videos.
The journalist also points to what Fedorov’s actions have accomplished so far. Until recently, the Meduza source said, publicly calling for elections during the war came across as thoroughly fringe in Ukraine: “Mykhailo, criticized as he is, has still taken a step toward normalizing the subject — and may have pushed the people working on changes to electoral legislation [for elections under martial law] to get moving.”
Since Fedorov’s dismissal, the President’s Office has been tracking his electoral ratings alongside those of Zelensky’s other opponents, just in case, a source close to the office told Meduza. In mid-July, before Fedorov left the defense ministry, the top three presidential contenders were Zelensky, Zaluzhny, and President’s Office head Kyrylo Budanov, the source said. By mid-August, Fedorov’s rating had climbed from 2–3% to 12–15%. That pushed him abruptly into the top three and displaced Budanov, according to data from a private poll the source cited.
Fedorov now alternates between second and third place and runs roughly even with Zaluzhny, the source said. Either of them could reach a runoff against Zelensky.
The source told Meduza he is not sure Zelenskyy will run. “The election is still a long way off,” he said. The president’s disapproval rating exceeds 50%, according to the latest data, a level driven by Ukrainians’ fatigue with the war and government corruption. Such numbers usually hurt a candidate’s chances in a runoff.
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Elizaveta Antonova