Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov on 15 July, after a meeting with military leadership, saying problems on the battlefield, in brigades and with mobilisation had not been resolved1. Kyiv Independent and Ukrainska Pravda had reported two days earlier, citing a senior official, that the president was considering it2. Fedorov confirmed his removal to reporters on the record and gave a narrower account of the cause: a permanent conflict with Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, who he said blocked ministry initiatives.
The dismissal sat inside a government-wide reshuffle Zelenskyy announced on 12 July, in which Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko submitted her resignation. Parliament voted on a new prime minister and cabinet on 16 July. Fedorov had run the ministry through a stretch in which the line of contact barely moved, with Russian forces losing men at seventeen times Ukraine's daily rate for ground that did not change hands. The battlefield problems Zelenskyy named were not problems a defence minister could fix alone, and the reshuffle around him suggests the president was reorganising a cabinet rather than isolating one failure.
Fedorov leaves with two entries on his ledger: persuading Elon Musk to keep Starlink out of Russian forces' hands, and the logistics lockdown campaign against Russian supply lines that he launched on 27 May. He declined the adviser role Zelenskyy offered him.
