Is Volodymyr Zelenskiy more focused on his own political survival than on winning the war? That is the question The Spectator's Owen Matthews asked after the Ukrainian president's sacking of his popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, and — days later — his chief of the general staff, Oleksandr Syrskyi..

Fedorov, credited with driving Ukraine's long-range drone programme and cutting corruption in military procurement, was fired after a week of street protests and a parliamentary revolt — reactions Matthews reads not as proof of dysfunction, but as evidence of how tightly Zelenskiy now manages competing power centres around him.

The argument also backed by political analyst Aleksandar Djokic and former National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) governor Kyrylo Shevchenko, is that the Ukrainian state now operates as three concentric rings. The outer ring is performative, aimed at Western sensibilities: "the feminist girl boss, the modern tech bro, the sweet-talking young minister with UwU stickers on her laptop," as Djokic puts it. The second ring — "the dream factory," in the words of a former senior minister cited by Matthews — exists for domestic consumption, an apparatus of loyal politicians, journalists and bloggers who talk bluntly about recovering lost territory and defeating Russia.

The innermost ring, where the real decisions are made, is composed of Zelenskiy loyalists and vested interests. "He understands and trusts his own team only," a former member of Zelenskiy's government, who has known him for 15 years, told Matthews. "These are the people whose interests he will protect first and foremost."

Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, is facing mounting accusations that Zelenskiy is showing authoritarian tendencies as his government has been convulsed by the $100mn kickback Energoatom corruption scandal, also known as Mindichgate, which has implicated figures inside Zelenskiy's inner circle and contributed directly to July's government reshuffle. The Financial Times has separately run its own piece describing Zelenskiy's governing style in similarly authoritarian terms, echoing concerns raised repeatedly by Ukrainian civil society and opposition figures over the past year. A recent poll showed Zelenskiy popularity falling to 58%, while that of ex-Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov soared from 35% to 65% in the last week alone.

The corruption scandal has already undermined Ukraine’s credibility in Brussels, which was already worried about backsliding on the corruption issue: the EU downgraded Ukraine to a "B" grade in its most recent reforms review — part of Kyiv's EU accession bid— specifically naming corruption as the outstanding weakness. Matthews' three-tier model offers one explanation for why that keeps happening: an innermost circle “selected for loyalty rather than competence” has an obvious incentive to protect itself first, whatever the cost to the war effort or to Ukraine's Western integration.