President Volodymyr Zelenskiy won every immediate fight over Ukraine's government reshuffle and still came out of it weaker, a Carnegie Politika analysis argues.

The Verkhovna Rada confirmed the last two ministers of the reshuffle, among them Yevhenii Khmara as defence minister with 312 votes. The same vote killed off a revolt by Mykhailo Fedorov, the former defence minister, who had put out a late-night video on August 18 accusing the authorities of systemic corruption and calling for a public debate on holding elections during the war.

Opposition factions voted with the governing majority, both for Khmara and against Fedorov's attempt to turn a personal quarrel with the president into a political campaign, according to note by political scientist Balazs Jarabik published in Carnegie Politika on August 31.

Fedorov is the first senior figure from the president's original 2019 team to break with him publicly during the full-scale war. The confrontation is now open, it comes on top of the growing domestic political crisis Zelenskiy has facing for months, and the questions Fedorov raised - whether the president still has a mandate for an indefinite war and whether the government can be renewed without elections - do not go away because the man who asked them asked them badly. Initial support for Fedorov has faded as he has been successfully tarred as acting in his own political interest rather than for the good of the country.

Fedorov appears to have expected that his approval ratings, his record as a moderniser, his links to anti-corruption activists and Western contacts, and support in parts of the defence-technology sector would force his reinstatement. Weeks of protests after his removal seemed to bear that out, but those same protests are now petering out.

"They miscalculated," Jarabik writes. Khmara's reputation as a wartime hero made him awkward to oppose, but opposition parties had no interest in building up a new rival, and Fedorov's video landed late at night with no coalition, no organisation and no credible account of how a country under attack would hold a vote, something polling shows most Ukrainians do not want while the war continues.

The day after the confirmation, the anti-corruption agencies charged Iryna Mudra, deputy head of the presidential administration, with money laundering, adding to Zelenskiy’s headaches. Set beside an investigation into Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine's former ambassador to the United States, the case exposed what Jarabik calls the underlying fragility of the governing model: the president himself is unchallenged, but the investigations around his office have become instruments of pressure as the mushrooming corruption scan implicates most of the president’s inner circle.

"The greater threat to Zelensky comes not from Fedorov alone, but from the convergence between the former defence minister's political campaign and the anti-corruption investigations moving ever closer to the presidential administration," Jarabik writes.

Zelenskiy dismissed Mudra quickly. The timing of the case, hours before Khmara's confirmation, hardened suspicions that parts of the anti-corruption apparatus had joined the political fight, and some activists who had opposed wartime elections began arguing for a debate on them after Fedorov's dismissal.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office remain a real constraint on presidential power, but they work inside Ukraine's politics rather than above it, and the timing of a case can shape a political outcome. "This makes them inherently political actors, even when the underlying investigations are legitimate," Jarabik writes. The result is disruption without accountability: institutions fragmenting rather than reforming.

Fedorov has his own credibility problem. He joined the team in 2019 and spent seven years at its highest levels, and his denunciation of total corruption came only after he lost the ministry and failed to get it back, which lets the presidential administration cast the whole affair as resentment, with some success.

He also has competition. Former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi is still the most obvious alternative in the polls, and Kyrylo Budanov, the former military intelligence chief who now heads the presidential administration, has a constituency of his own, as do several prominent commanders. Fedorov's base among liberal civil society, younger urban voters and the defence-technology sector is not yet a national coalition.

For Zelenskiy the situation is decaying as he facing a multiplying number of problems. Ukraine is losing part of its mid-range technological advantage as Russia gets better at disrupting Starlink. The defence budget deficit is widening and is now $27bn, the president said during his Independence Day speech. Attacks on ports and storage could halve Ukraine’s exports this year and Russia is now trying to systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail sector. Dependence on external financing keeps growing, and infighting inside the governing team has become routine. In the latest sign of internal tensions, Zelenskiy has to sack the head of the SBU this week after it ended up in a shoot out with its sister organisation, the HUF, Ukraine’s military intelligence organ.

Fedorov also broke with Kyiv's official line by saying Ukraine was "gradually, slowly losing the war" and lacked a theory of victory, an argument Jarabik expects to find an audience in a society still determined to resist but increasingly sceptical of how the war is being run.

Winter may bury the tensions for a while as survival takes over. Ukraine may again prove more resilient than the gloomier forecasts. But the margin for error is narrowing. Putin this week ordered the full destruction of what remains of Ukraine’s power sector a month before the heating season begins.

"The president has restored control over the government while losing something harder to recover: the unity of the political system he created," Jarabik concludes.