If Ukraine is winning the war, why did Zelenskyy fire his defence minister?

[Music] Hello and welcome back to Independent Thinking, the weekly podcast from Tatum House. I'm John Lough, Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme, and I'm sitting in this week for Bromley Maddox. Over the past two weeks, there have been some dramatic developments at the very top of the Ukrainian armed forces. Upheavals which could have major consequences for Ukraine's war effort. A dispute between the popular 35-year-old defense minister, Nishailov Fedorov, and the 60-year-old commander-in-chief, Alexander Siersky. This led to President Zelensky firing Fedorov in a surprise cabinet reshuffle. Ukrainians took to the streets to protest, demanding that Zelensky reinstate Fedorov, who is part of a group of tech-focused strategists, credited with the long-range drone strikes that have recently brought the war home to the Russian population in ways that did not seem previously imaginable. The protesters also called for the removal of Siersky, widely seen in Ukraine as a Soviet-era officer, with scant regard for saving the lives of soldiers. Zelensky was forced to comply, replacing Siersky with a new Fedorov-friendly commander-in-chief, but Sierdorov turned down the offer, or alternative roles in the government, and calls continue for him to return to head the defense ministry. What does all this mean for the future of Ukraine's war effort? What is its impact on Zelensky's leadership? We'll be discussing the cabinet reshuffle, the current dynamics in the war, and the possibility of a new US-led attempt to end the war. To talk it over, I'm joined by three guests. Solorans Friedman is a meritorious professor of war studies at King's College of London, and one of Britain's most respected voices on strategy. Hello, Solorans Friedman. Hello. Vadim Pristnyko was Ukraine's ambassador to the UK from 2020 to 2023, and he joins us from Kiev. He was Minister Foreign Affairs in the first Zelensky government. Hello, Vadim. Hello, John. And from Chadem House, we have Yelislava Biberi, Research Fellow with Ukraine Forum in our Russia and Eurasia program. Good to see you, Yelislava. Good to see you, John. Let's start with the latest. Yelislava, how do you assess President Zelensky's meeting this week with President Trump? Has he won over Trump? He certainly seems to be wooing some of the mega-crowd. Yes, I mean, certainly we've seen a warming up between the two presidents. The relationship seems to be more cordial and business-like, and as you rightly pointed out, there's also a very interesting shift in rhetoric from Trump's "Maga orbit," particularly as we saw with the recent visit of "Maga influences Laura Luma to cave that had a sudden change of heart from years of amplifying Russian propaganda narrative and now seemingly insisting on US support for Ukraine." However, I think that it seems premature to believe that Trump has done a new reversible return on Ukraine. We have seen in the past that he has historically tended to align with more favorable positions towards Russia, so we still have to see. Nonetheless, overall, it was a positive meeting to an extent. We've seen a commitment to revive a diplomatic effort, and there are rumors that Trump's envoys might be coming to visit. Cave, however, that would be the first time, and in the past, we've seen that they've walked back from plans or visiting. And also, a positive development was the procedural vote on Lindsey Graham Bill that would allow the US President to impose up to 100% tariffs on the top importers of Russian energy, so therefore the push to try and suffocate Russia's ability to continue and which this war. And most importantly, the agreement by Trump of granting Ukraine the license to produce Patriot missiles is a positive development. However, this would take years, and as one of our new associate fellows, Mark DeVol Argues and his recent expert comments actually Russia now yearly produces 1,440 ballistic missiles, whereas the US produces only 650 Patriot missiles a year. Well, of course, Ukraine is very vulnerable to these ballistic missile attacks. I think everybody realizes that, and of course, great concern about this coming winter. But let's just turn briefly to the removal of Minister Fedorov. Why did Zelensky decide that he had to get rid of Fedorov? I mean, the public reason that President Zelensky has presented was a ostensibly insurmountable conflict between former commander-in-chief Alexander Assyersky and former Minister of Defense, Hylo Fedorov. However, incidentally, we actually had the publication of an interview with Fedorov yesterday evening in which he himself admitted that that was not really the reason. Ultimately, the real reason was to incompatible vision of how Ukraine should fight this war, but also the fact that to implement this vision of asymmetric warfare that Fedorov was consistently championing, that entailed a number of reforms, including the injection of transparency into defense procurement processes. There essentially would have created problems for a number of defense companies in Ukraine that were still sort of aligned with the old guard and an archaic way of conductive warfare that would prioritize assault brigades, rather than the asymmetric warfare that Fedorov has become the face of. So that is currently the widespread belief in Ukraine and the big worries that by-side lining Fedorov, these very important reforms that he had been championing, including also important moves on improving the mobilization system, giving Ukraine's significant manpower shortages could be stalled. Vadim, in the case of Fedorov, he's been credited certainly in Western countries as having been at the forefront of this drone and deep strike campaign, what Ukraine calls its long-distance sanctions or its kinetic sanctions, and these really seem to have had an effect on Russia because the Russians were not prepared for them. In fact, the ten top oil refineries have been attacked. This is an indication that Ukraine has been able to engage successfully in asymmetrical warfare. So it looks that way from the outside, but of course the Russians have retaliated and stepped up their ballistic missile attacks, etc., going off after now different targets in Ukraine. So how does this actually feel seen from Kiev right now? Does it feel that this has been successful in terms of widening awareness of the war in Russia and hurting the Russians in ways they didn't expect? Just in the issue here, one of the accusations towards Mikhail Fedorov from the president's office of the president himself was that he has not resolved the issue with anti-ballistic. Let's be frank, there is a can be resolved without the Americans providing the anti-ballistic missiles. So you hardly can use Mikhail for this. On the other side, whether every success on a long-distance missile attacks from Ukraine on the side can be attributed to Mikhail Fedorov. With all due respect, his great guy, he's doing great job, but it's not him, they're all forces and ministers before him were doing it, climbing up and building up this road towards our capabilities of really stepping up and really hurting Russia, especially in the economies like the oil refineries and everything else. So I believe that this is just logical that Ukrainians are developing in the way we are. This is what allowed us to concentrate on something which is quite successful in the eyes of the rest of the world. Laurie, we've heard about the clash of strategic styles. Fedorov is clearly hugely popular. At the same time, there were real concerns in Ukraine about the way Syrsky was treating soldiers. Is this a classic sense or classic case of the defense minister and the commander of the armed forces losing alignment in the stress of war? In some ways, yes, and it's not so unusual. It happens with many governments at a time of war. There's good reason for it. They have different priorities, different needs, different interests, resources of scarce. You have to decide on priorities. So even with quite successful wars, you often find a really bad temper at the top. I think the clash can be overstated here. Syrsky was quite a successful chief in many respects. He has quite a lot to his credit. The Russian offensive has stalled. It's not going as well as certainly Putin believes and is told by Gerasimov, but it's still a challenging situation for you, Ukraine, partly because of the problem of not having enough infantry, not having enough reprieve. He's been trying to find ways around that. I mean, Syrsky's reputation as somebody who school. lives goes back to battle with early battles and I don't think there's a lot of evidence that he's careless with his troops so much. Now it's partly the way that he's been fighting and also I think Sasuke was very very focused on operational issues. One of the criticisms of him was that he didn't stand back enough unless his subordinates and the sense of getting on with actually fighting the battles he wanted to be in making the decisions himself. So there's lots of criticisms of him but I think he can also be caricatured. A new guy I think has got off through a promising start and that I think probably will be an improvement just because he's a new generation and has a better understanding I think of what's more of a Western way of war, the delegating responsibility more to operational commanders which I don't think Sasuke did enough. And in terms of the Russian campaign it does seem that Ukraine has been this year able to slow down the Russian offensive but that said the Russians are still inching forward in Donbass, a mentally enormous cost in terms of soldiers' lives but they're not showing any signs of stopping. On the part of the Ukrainians there's been a very effective effort to isolate logistics based in Crimea but at the same time the Russian war machine is still functioning. Now the Russian general staff I think has told Putin that they can take the remaining part of Donbass what you know 20-25 percent of exactly what it is now by the end of the year but that looks to me to be extremely ambitious. Would you agree with that? I don't think they can do that. I think there's a number of things going on and there's something we just don't know enough about including how much the Ukrainian attack on Russian logistics fuel shortages is affecting the front. I mean you get anecdotal stuff about it affecting particular units they don't have enough they've got to walk a long way to get diesel and all sorts of things so it must be having some effect it would be surprising it didn't. You've also got some areas where the Ukrainians are clearly pushing the Russians back not in the Donbass itself but there are some areas and the Ukrainians have been I think sensitive to be quite quite about that rather than doing what the Russians do which is getting people to plant flags by and large the Ukrainians have not been pretending to take areas as the Russians say on credit. I think the big problem is if you keep on pushing people into these sort of urban areas and battles going on at the moment even if it's in ones and twos and so on they're hard to dislodge once they're there that's one problem the other problem is that if the Russians can move their drone operators forward then they can start to hit the so-called fortress cities and are doing that increasingly. Now that doesn't mean that they're going to be taken it just makes life miserable for those there may lead to some evacuation it already has led to a degree of some evacuation so it's not as if they're advancing in a traditional military way and we haven't seen that for a very long time in Ukraine these are not sort of great armoured mechanised breakthroughs with speedy advances there's nothing like about going on it's slow it's cruelling it's costly but it does get them some distance it does put Ukrainian lives more at risk and the amount they've got to travel is not enormous these are tens of kilometres not hundreds of kilometres so I think it's quite a tight situation in the complex situation at the front I don't think anybody's fully in control at the moment where do you think it is heading it's clearly entered a new stage this year with Ukraine fighting back in unexpected ways exposing considerable Russian vulnerabilities a large section of the Russian population is now experiencing the war it had been insulated from it before the Americans that seems have not given up on the idea of trying to broker some sort of cease-fire perhaps or even peace settlement between Russian Ukraine although personally I remain persuaded that long as Putin is in power that there is not going to be a final peace settlement but do you think there is any chance that there could be a pause in this war at some point in the near future perhaps towards the end of this year or beginning of next year well I mean a number of people have now put the point to Putin I mean it's a very strange situation I mean the issue is normally between a cease-fire and a peace settlement the peace settlement is very difficult because there are numerous issues that have to be addressed peace settlements and never negotiated quickly and cease-fire seem quite simple but they're actually quite difficult where actually is the line of contact at the moment you can imagine all sorts of arguments if you try to draw the line as to where there's Russians on the one side and Ukrainians on the other because a lot of places they're intermingled but that was what you would normally expect to be the debate about but here we've got one side insisting that the other should give up territory that Russia has failed to take that's what people are asking Putin to abandon if he abandoned that and you could move to discussions on a cease-fire and you saw President Kazakstan saying the same thing directly to Putin the other day so it's not as if people are not making the point to him and he says that that he won't that he's being very stubborn I think almost any other leader of Russia at the moment but probably say that's you know that that's the cash in our games and call it today but we're dependent upon trying to unravel what's going on in the mind of this guy now the economic pressures I think are becoming pretty significant I think inflation is going to really take off in Russia because the central bank can't control it with interest rates anymore what's been going on with the fuel shortages and so on is all going to add to inflation as well as the the Iran war I'm that's already probably understated in in official figures so I think the fact that the war has come home to Putin to the Russian people the economy is clearly struggling may have an effect in the end I think a lot depends still on the front line Putin has been told by Karassimov and we did mention this earlier that they can take the rest of the net this has been promised many times before and they fell to do it and there's a question of how long this game can continue to be played before people around Putin really say this is time this isn't enough but well we're still dependent on a very stubborn person to give up on his vision and just perhaps one final point I think you have to take it his vision very seriously he believes that Ukraine should not be a separate state he believes it's be subjugated and it's ceasefire doesn't really have to for him because it leaves a hostile government in Kiev and the prospect of future hostilities a future fighting with more western backing for Ukraine in the future so I think he's caught between his initial ambition and what he can now get and it's not good enough for him and it will be seen as a failure and he gave an extraordinary speech at Navy Day where he's talking as if they're going to be bereft without the war what are we going to do when there's no war he's created a war economy he's militarized in the country and I don't think he he quite knows how to end it without it appearing as the most monumental failure and another thing to look out for is giving that Russia's monthly casualty raid exceeds their monthly recruitment rate whether after the September doom elections that might go for mobilization mobilization is also politically very risky this is factor number one in terms of the anxiety of Russian society Ukraine's constitution prohibits elections during wartime in light of development over the past two weeks is there any pressure in Ukraine now for elections to go ahead we we have occasionally heard talk about some holding elections and I think President Zelensky at one stage was very much under American pressure to do this is this subject for serious discussion at the moment I wouldn't say so when you look at recent surveys inside Ukraine you still have an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians that believe elections should take place only after a peace deal is in place and that's also because elections is not just about you know election day there's a whole set of preparatory steps and logistical legal challenges that Ukraine would face and therefore the widespread consensus is that they would not be feasible anytime soon however certainly there is a demand for political renewal and given the restrictions under martial law Ukrainian civil society still maintains its role in trying to keep power in check and making sure that as the Lensky administration that has demonstrated a tendency to centralize power and exhibiting opaque style of governance, making sure that the Lensky administration does not cross certain red lines as we saw one year ago, by the way, with the largest demonstrations since the start of Russia full-scaling vision against a move to encroach on the independence of anti-corruption agencies and a few weeks back again with the perceived cross-red lines of sightlining individuals that had become the face of a new way of warfare that in a way crumble that myth of Russia's invincibility, the idea that Russia's victory is inevitable. And so that I think is the most important thing to highlight here that even in the absence of elections, Ukrainian civil society keeps power in check and demonstrates this important sense of solidarity between soldiers on the front line and Ukrainian society in the in the rear that they defend a certain vision of what Ukraine should be. Yes, well, the force of civil society can be very much felt at the moment and despite for an half years of war and it really is very impressive. Vadim, as we speak, the political crisis appears to be still unresolved, but what is happening with the protests right now? Are they continuing in some form? They are continuing actually, John, and not just continuing, but they are turning in something new. So instead of just staying in the front of the president's office, since today, the idea is that they will move as the sort of rally from the center key towards the president's office, thus showing that we are changing, we are sort of moving to the phase two, which will be to bring more attention from the Ukrainian specialty key ones. And what people have also seen that they've been not actually fooled, but the resolution is half-baked, meaning that Syrsky is yes, he's out, but it was not the original idea, the original idea was to get a ferdar in. We have to get back for a second to the ferdar. He is the young yes, but he is also the oldest minister in the president Zelensky's government. He was the first to join the group as the minister of digital transformation. And since then, he was the only one who stayed from the regional government. Over this year, Zelensky changed five ministers of defense. You can argue that for the war fighting nation, this is a bit too much. And that's what people also saying. I also understand that Michal Ferdarovin has recently quite interesting, but very diplomatic, let me put this way. He was not criticizing Zelensky's trade forwardly, and what he also did, he said that it's not even Syrsky, which was the sort of cultural difference, not the personal difference. It's not that much of rivalry with Zelensky, political rivalry, but actually what he was accusing this big fat cats, what he was alluding at, the new sort of new primes of Ukraine, which are tightly connected to the new political forces, mostly in the parliament. But from my point of view, what the most important part was that now the voices are that Michal Ferdarov hasn't resolved the mobilization part. And mobilization is not just difficult for the military, it's extremely difficult politically, especially for the president of Zelensky. He never mentioned in his speeches once that mobilization is something we have all departed it. He also expected, always expect, somebody else, like Michal Ferdarov as the minister of defense, resolve it. But let's be frank, mobilization is such a vulnerable part in Ukraine, sort of mythology of how we're fighting the war. And this is so difficult for political forces to resolve it that obviously, President Zelensky will somebody else to do it, not him. There has been a wider cabinet reshuffle. Zelensky has appointed a new prime minister, Serhika Garietsky. Hadesky led the state energy company, Nafthugas. Is this an indication that Ukraine is going to be preparing energy infrastructure for the coming winter on the assumption that Russia is going to attack again in the same way it did last year. Let's remember last year was an exceptionally cold winter. What do you think is the purpose of this cabinet reshuffle? John, you know, in Ukraine, it's why they discussed whether you as a good move to take the chief of the biggest energy company, which is responsible for the heating and then producing generating electricity for the year, not only for the winter, and put this guy to the position of the prime minister who will be looking after everything else, not just energy preparedness and everything. So this is not allowing people to swallow this idea that reshuffle was done just to prepare for the harsh winter. And fueling even more discussion that all this thing was manufactured only with one purpose to replace the popular minister of defense. Don't believe that this is the case. It's a bit too much on a third of theory here, but there is a lack of understanding why we are changing the next prime minister again and again why we are changing the ministers. This reshuffle, because of this complexity crumbled and it's weighed, so we lost minister of homeland security, which was offered as the chief of national security defense council, then the chief of national security defense council have to be found the job. So he was offered the job of the busserity United States, which was before offered to prime minister who refused to take. So all of this, you know, very complicated game was played and people started asking why do we even have to play it. So the potential answer could be the N.I. getting back to the question of elections. This is coming and again and again in the Ukrainian political picture probably because the political forces are so tired not to have any chance to manifest the ability of being somebody. So the position is not having just to grow in the same political power. There is no government of national unity, which was offered many many times. So the picture political is becoming still and complicated at the same time. Yada Slava, I want to come back to the issue of why people are protesting at the moment, back last year when Zelensky tried to curtail the powers of the anti-corruption agencies. There was a very strong reaction from civil society. Now in this case, seems to me that the Yada Fedorov was seen as a representative of a new era. Somebody who wanted to make sure that military budgets were more transparent, that money was spent in more effective ways. Does his removal make people in civil society suspicious that this is an attempt to stop the cleanup of defense procurement and other measures to make sure that money are marked for defense is spent properly? Well, that's certainly one of the main suspicions among Ukrainian civil society and one of the reasons why the move has backfired. So intensely, Fedorov had become the champion, the face of a number of reforms that reignited Ukrainian's belief in Ukraine's ability to prevail even though there's been a significant strategic shift from the initials, you know, rhetoric around victory towards a more realistic assessment of what Ukraine could achieve for years into a full-scale invasion. And in yesterday's interview, Fedorov has insisted that ultimately that was the main reasons for his removal that he and his team had put in place a number of steps that would have fundamentally changed the way people get appointed, the way resources are allocated, introducing transparent digitized procurement processes. And therefore, Ukrainian civil society is currently worried that removing such effective individuals could stall life-saving reforms. And the dismissal came at a very odd time because, as you mentioned, Ukraine was making gains in its attempts to isolate the Crimean Peninsula and we've seen an increase in deep strikes that have really managed to bring the war home to Russia. So even the timing of this decision was very odd to Ukrainians. So, overall, it's quite strange to see Ukrainians chanting in support of a particular politicians. That's quite unprecedented, but ultimately, as he himself had with us, not about he himself, but it's about the vision that he represented and the hope that he had brought back to Ukrainian society. Indeed, I want to really follow up on this point. Ukrainians in large numbers have come out on the streets in support of Fedorov. This is the active part of society, we've got to refer to as civil society. But I wonder what do you think more widely? How unified is society at this stage of the war? People are extraordinarily tired and there is still no relief inside. This war could, in fact, continue for a good long while. Yes, you're right about the Ukrainians are getting tired. Everybody will, five years of war, but if you get back to the essence of this events right now. Most of the people you were see that they are quite young. It's not just the whole society. It's very young and I guess that it's about these people seeing the hope in particular, a guy of Mihail Afro-Naf. It's not that much of the whole change of the war. They just want to see that war could be resolved. And it is resolved in a way that they are not mobilized in the front lines, let me be frank. And Mihail Afro was offering this robot fight first idea in comparison to Syrsky who needed more troops to be sent to front lines. This was particularly well taken by the young generation. And generally, in political, if you take the Ukraine five years ago when Zelensky came to power, his major major idea was that I'm young. Even if you remember the last letter to the President Putin in open letter, she was reminded that he was old. So this is sort of political now missed that the young, energetic leader can bring us to power. Surprise, surprise, the years go by and somebody else is becoming young. Like Misha Földer is becoming Masha Young, the Zelensky right now. So this rivalry, sorry, is coming to the biological side of it, but this is important to understand why so many Ukrainian youngsters came to this square in front of President's office. Yes, the idea that Zelensky is getting old is an intriguing one when I hadn't thought of myself. Laurie, to finish off, I want to ask you as a historian and of course we have history in the making here, how do you assess Zelensky's wartime leadership so far? I think he's been a pretty effective external leader. He did the first thing that he had to do, which was survive the first couple of days, stay in Kiev, give leadership, he established good relations with European leaders. He showed enormous patience with the Americans, which must have been extremely testing at times, I mean the temperature humiliated. I mean we do have to give this compare where we are at the moment with what it looked like in February 2025. So I think externally he's done a pretty good job, but I think that's generally recognised. Internally and it's called mixed picture. And I think partly, and I thought this is all we said of leaders to get things wrong, I don't think he was well advised. I think some of the people around him were not desperately helpful, some of them have now gone. And there was some hope that he had a more settled team and I've just had explained he's unsettled it again. And I think partly is about frustration, partly about some problems that seem pretty insoluble, how do you defend against Russian ballistic missiles, how do you sort out this recruitment and mobilisation issue, and he looks around for somebody else to take me. So I think he'll get good marks from historians from how he's handled Ukraine's international position, less good marks internally. And I think if you look back, I mean everybody always looks at Churchill who of course also didn't have to have elections during wartime. But he was also part of a coalition and a lot of the social reforms and ideas for the future that were developed while Britain was at war were developed by his coalition partners. And I think this comes back to this issue of more national unity. I mean it's good that Ukraine is a civil society that acts as a check on government. There's probably true with any government in Ukraine that is going to be treated with enormous suspicion by the people, it's just the way of things. But it shouldn't have to depend on that. It would be better to have a much more stable government. In Russia, Britain makes the opposite mistake. He doesn't change his ministers at all. He doesn't change his chief of staff. Your asthma, who's seen one disaster after another is still there. So there's a balance. You need to change people occasionally, but to let people be does it too much. That brings us to the end of this week's edition of independent thinking from Chattam House. Thank you, Yelosava Biberi. Thank you. Thank you, Vadim Pristaka. Thank you, John. And thanks also to Lawrence Friedman. I pleasure. This is we hope you enjoyed the podcast. Independent thinking is out every Friday. So don't forget to follow us on your favorite app. And room to check the show notes for links to some of our latest work. You can always find our analysis on world affairs, economics, geopolitics, and more at chattamhouse.org. Bromham Maddox will be back in the chair for next week's podcast. I hope you'll join her next time. I'm John Lough. Thanks for being with us today. Goodbye. [BLANK_AUDIO]