18JUN

Eight cities protest for three days

2 min read

09:57UTC

Crowds returned to Ivan Franko Square in Kyiv for three consecutive days from 16 July, with seven other cities joining in shifting combinations. The chants included "Corruption kills" and "Syrsky out".

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Key takeaway

A government under martial law let three days of protest run in eight cities without a crackdown.

Crowds formed at Ivan Franko Square in Kyiv on 16 July and came back for three consecutive days, with Lviv and Dnipro out alongside them throughout, Kharkiv and Odesa on the first day, and Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi and Mykolaiv joining by the third. Protesters chanted "Corruption kills" and "Syrsky out" ¹. The trigger was the removal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov the previous day, and the anger pointed past him at Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, whom Fedorov had publicly blamed for blocking his ministry.

Wartime Ukraine has held no elections since the invasion and governs under martial law, which makes the roster of cities worth reading closely. Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro sustained crowds for the full three days; Kharkiv and Odesa, both within regular missile range, turned out once and stopped. Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not move against the demonstrators and said the protests showed Ukraine "remains a democratic country".

That restraint has an audience outside Ukraine. Kyiv's accession negotiations opened in Brussels in June , and the chapters still to come are the ones that examine judicial independence, anti-corruption bodies and the treatment of civil society. A government that answered street protests with arrests during the same summer would be arguing against its own file.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

After Ukraine's president fired his defence minister, crowds started gathering in city squares to protest the decision. It began in Kyiv on 16 July and kept going for three days, spreading to eight cities including Lviv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Odesa. Protesters chanted things like "Corruption kills" and "Syrsky out", the second aimed at the army's commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi. Zelenskyy did not try to stop the protests. He said the fact people could gather and chant against the government, in the middle of a war, showed Ukraine "remains a democratic country", a line he repeated as the demonstrations entered their third day rather than retreated from it.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Fedorov entered government in 2019 as Minister of Digital Transformation, built the Diia digital-services platform, and more recently oversaw Ukraine's drone-warfare programme; that record makes him a recognisable public figure, but nothing published explains how the protests spread to eight cities in three days, and this desk found no source that does.

What the record does establish: Fedorov publicly attributed his dismissal to a conflict with Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi, protesters directed their anger past Fedorov and at Syrskyi himself with chants of "Syrsky out" alongside "Corruption kills", and Zelenskyy's own acknowledgement that mobilisation and brigade problems remain unresolved gives that anger a specific policy failure to point at, in a wartime government where no election offers a different outlet for it.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Zelenskyy's decision not to suppress the protests functions as a public legitimacy signal at a moment his own government is being accused of mismanaging the war effort.

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from United States and Ukraine

United States

Ukraine

LeftRight

Primary parallel: Britain's wartime coalition government permitted large industrial strikes through 1944 despite total-war footing, calculating that suppressing domestic dissent risked more legitimacy damage than the disruption itself; Zelenskyy is making the same trade-off by letting three days of street protest run unopposed.

Counter-parallel: Russia's own wartime protest ban, in force since 2022 and applied to any anti-war demonstration, shows the opposite institutional choice under a comparable invasion footing. The contrast underlines that Kyiv's restraint is a deliberate legitimacy bet, not a default outcome of wartime governance.

Consensus view: A government operating under martial law, with no elections held since the invasion, absorbed three days of protest across eight cities without moving against demonstrators. That restraint reads as a deliberate bid for democratic credibility, one that matters ahead of EU accession chapters covering judicial independence and civil society space.

Counter-view: Tolerating protest costs a wartime government very little when it already holds every lever that matters, from martial law itself to the timing of any future election. Restraint under those conditions may signal confidence rather than any genuine democratic opening.

Key tension: The same restraint reads as strength or as irrelevance depending on whether the protests could ever change anything, given no election is scheduled to give them a route to consequence.

Sources:RFE/RL·Ukrainska Pravda

Mentions:Volodymyr Zelenskyy →Oleksandr Syrskyi →Kyiv →Lviv →Dnipro →Vinnytsia →Kharkiv →Mykhailo Fedorov →Brussels →Ukraine →Odesa →Russia →

First Reported In

Update #24 · Fedorov sacked as the front stands still

RFE/RL· 19 Jul 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Eight cities protest for three days

Ukrainians demonstrated against a wartime government under martial law, and the government let them.

Led to

Zelenskyy dismisses Syrskyi, names Drapatyi war chief

The 16-21 July street protests demanded Syrskyi's removal and Fedorov's reinstatement, precipitating the commander-in-chief's dismissal.

Occurred 21 Jul 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Cross-border power traders

The France-Germany day-ahead spread flipped from a EUR 17.20 German premium on 1 August to a EUR 4.15 French premium on 3 August, the same day French curtailment peaked. They cannot yet attribute the flip to curtailment alone, since a like-for-like overnight comparison shows French nuclear output rising while wind fell and demand returned on the weekday step.

EDF

River-cooling limits took 7.6 GW, 12 per cent of its fleet, offline on 3 August, the highest curtailment since the heatwave began, with an easing forecast to 4.3 GW on 4 August and 3 GW after. It manages the cut as a recurring seasonal constraint, expecting it to lift with river temperature, not repair.

Gasunie

TTF, the Dutch hub it operates, drifted to roughly EUR 55 to 58 per MWh across the window, staying inside its recent range through both the German spark reversal and the French curtailment. It reads a flat hub price as evidence that neither event this window carried enough weight to move the fuel leg on its own.

German gas-fired generators

Record German solar of 18,761 MW on 2 August pushed the clean spark spread to minus 18.48 EUR/MWh, a loss-making day, before it returned to plus 16.20 on 3 August. They now price dispatch against post-solar residual load rather than wind alone, since the sign flipped inside 48 hours on unchanged fuel and carbon costs.

European Commission (DG Energy)

Its implementing-measures register logged transposition notices from only Portugal and Slovakia against Wednesday's Article 94 deadline for Directive (EU) 2024/1788, with 25 states silent. It expects the register to fill only gradually, since filing routinely lags legislating and any infringement track against non-notifying states runs on a slower clock than the deadline itself.

Spain's LNG terminal operators

Spain's 9,145 GWh terminal inventory is the largest single stock in the EU LNG network, an option value that can reroute cargoes wherever the winter strip pays best rather than a cavern gas obligation tied to a fixed date. That flexibility matters more as Germany's cavern shortfall pushes more of the winter security question onto import infrastructure.