The fate of Ukraine’s Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov hangs in the balance. Less than a year on the job he has already won a reputation as a radical reformer and cracked down on corruption in the notoriously venal procurement process but is also despised by the bulk of Ukraine’s military elite as he is a tech entrepreneur not a military man.

Fedorov's name has been floated as a possible successor to Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s latest government reshuffle. But the Financial Times reported on July 15 that Zelenskiy also might sacked him this week thanks to pressure by Ukraine’s military leadership.

“Defence industry officials, senior Ukrainian officials, MPs from Zelenskyy’s party and others familiar with the matter have said — some publicly — that Fedorov had been a barrier to interests seeking to profit from Ukraine’s vast wartime defence budget,” the FT reports. “Fedorov repeatedly blocked attempts to steer lucrative procurement contracts to favoured companies, which put him at odds with powerful figures inside Ukraine’s political and defence establishment, said people familiar with the situation.”

Ukraine's Parliament voted to dismiss Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko on July 15, which triggers the resignation of the entire Cabinet. In the coming days the Verkhovna Rada will nominate a new Prime Minister who will then form a new government. Fedorov's fate is also up in the air as the forces that want to keep him and see him go are violently opposed.

Tech guru with a gun

Fedorov made his name by putting the Ukrainian state into a smartphone. Now he is trying to do something considerably harder: reboot an army of roughly 1mn people in the middle of Europe's biggest war since 1945.

The 35-year-old former tech entrepreneur and digital transformation minister took over Ukraine's Ministry of Defence in January with no military experience and a conviction that many of the army's problems could be fixed with the same tools he had used to overhaul government services: data, digitisation, competition and ruthless performance metrics.

"Today, it is impossible to fight with new technologies using an old organisational structure," Fedorov told lawmakers before his appointment.

"Our goal is to change the system: to reform the army, improve infrastructure on the front lines, eradicate lies and corruption, and make leadership and trust a new culture."

Six months later, the experiment is colliding with one of Ukraine's most powerful institutions: the military itself. Since taking over he has managed to step on pretty much everyone’s toes and is widely despised by the establishment. But he is getting the job done and he is doing it so well that reported Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy asked him to become Prime Minister in this week’s dramatic government reshuffle. He said no, Ukrainska Pravda reports, as he is not finished with reforming the Defence Ministry.

Some Ukrainian generals have compared Fedorov to Robert McNamara, the former Ford (NYSE: F) executive who brought systems analysis, statistics and corporate management techniques to the Pentagon during the Vietnam war.

More to the point, no Ukrainians are comparing him to the former Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who Zelenskiy was forced to sack after he got embroiled in a major corruption scandal after his ministry was caught paying four-times the market rate for eggs to feed the soldiers. Ukraine’s procurement system is notoriously corrupt and comes in the general context of widespread corruption in the upper echelons of the government. Most of Zelenskiy’s inner circle and closest friends have been implicated in the $100mn kickback Energoatom corruption scandal and were forced to resign, including the last Defence Minister Rustem Umerov.

The issue a lot of the military has is that Fedorov is not a military man. "Would you really sit in an aeroplane if you saw that the pilot was a shopkeeper?" one Ukrainian general asked, according to The Economist. Fedorov believes Ukraine cannot win a 21st-century war with a Soviet-style bureaucracy. His critics believe a man who has never fought is trying to turn war into an app.

Fedorov versus the generals

Fedorov has clashed with Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, a career soldier who trained at the Moscow Higher Military Command School and served in the Soviet artillery corps before Ukraine became independent.

“The dispute involving disagreements over how Ukraine should fight the war and organise its armed forces had grown serious, and the president was tired of it,"  people familiar with the relationship told the FT. "Arms procurement and military strategy were areas of disagreement."

Born into different generations, one in the Soviet Union and the other in an independent Ukraine, the two men speak different professional languages.

Syrskyi had a classic Soviet military training, but for Fedorov, war is increasingly a competition between innovation cycles. A cheap drone developed in months can destroy equipment worth millions of dollars. Battlefield data can identify successful units. Competitive procurement can stretch scarce defence budgets. Artificial intelligence can improve targeting and autonomous systems can reduce Ukrainian casualties.

By contrast, Syrskyi has a reputation for his disregard for human life when throwing units into difficult conditions – the Russian style of fighting. Some AFU servicemen have nicknamed him “General 200”, a reference to the Soviet-era “cargo 200”, the military code for coffins on military transport.

He was heavily criticised for the heavy loss of life during the defence of Bakhmut, which was eventually lost to Russia in May 2023 after months of attritional fighting.

For traditional Ukrainian commanders, war remains fundamentally about men, territory, logistics, discipline and the ability of units to hold ground under fire.

Some critics liken Fedorov to a modern-day McNamara, whose "whiz kids" attempted to manage the Vietnam war through statistics and systems analysis and were widely blamed for contributing to the US defeat.

Tensions have spilled into public view. Reports have suggested Fedorov sought Syrskyi's removal but failed to dislodge the commander-in-chief. Syrskyi has denied there is a conflict.

"We have absolutely no conflict," he said in June, adding that the two men "have no right to clash" while Ukraine is at war.

Fedorov’s smartphone

Born in 1991 in Vasylivka in Ukraine's southern Zaporizhzhia region, Fedorov belongs to a generation of Ukrainian politicians whose careers were built after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He entered Zelenskiy's orbit during the comedian-turned-politician's successful 2019 presidential campaign, running its digital operation. At just 28, he became deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation.

His signature achievement was Diia, Ukraine's government services platform that is used by almost the entire population and has been a big success. Digital passports, driving licences, tax payments, business registration and scores of other interactions with the state are now all online and in the app. The project made Fedorov the face of Zelenskiy's promise to build a "state in a smartphone".

After Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the digital ministry increasingly became part of Ukraine's war machine.

Fedorov’s big claim to fame is he was the one that brokered the deal to bring Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals to the front, which have become the backbone of the military communications system. He also promoted the Army of Drones programme early on that has transformed modern warfare worldwide since. And he later backed Brave1, the defence technology platform designed to connect Ukrainian military units, developers and investors.

Just this week Fedorov signed off on the new BraveTech EU Ukraine Support Instrument, which allows Ukraine’s companies to access €260mn in funding to scale up production and €35.3mn for innovation grants—covering up to 100% of costs, Fedorov announced in a social media post.

“This is a true win-win. We are combining EU resources with our battlefield-tested tech to build a safer Europe. Thank you, Andrius Kubilius and the EU team,” Fedorov wrote.

More controversially, he brought a gamer’s mentality to the war, setting up the “Army of Drones Bonus System,” which awards virtual points for verified real world battlefield kills. Those points can be exchanged for drones and other equipment. The idea was to fight like in a game and direct resources to the most lethal “players.”

The scheme is classic Fedorov: collect data, create incentives and reward measurable performance. But that is also exactly what worries his critics.

Traditional officers argue that the system risks rewarding spectacular drone strikes and kills while undervaluing less glamorous traditional military tactics and strategy, such as reconnaissance, logistics or simply holding and monitoring a strategically important road. Killing enemy soldiers is of course important, but as every student of Eastern European military history knows, Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov beat the invading Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 by avoiding a direct clash, letting Russia’s bitterly cold weather do his work for him.

Taking an axe to procurement

Fedorov's answer is essentially that what cannot be measured cannot be managed. More prosaically, he has waded into the quagmire that is the defence ministry’s bureaucracy to root out corruption and inefficiency. When Zelenskiy moved Fedorov to the defence ministry in January, the young iconoclastic technocrat immediately began looking under the bonnet.

Amongst his very first actions was to order a sweeping internal audit of the ministry that subsequently identified savings and optimisation worth about UAH60bn ($1.4bn), according to the Ministry of Defence. The money is now being used to fund the first phase of Fedorov's military transformation programme.

Procurement was the obvious first target. Where there used to be closed bidding by related party shell companies to supply the army, Fedorov introduced open and competitive tenders to cut the insiders out. A tender for 155mm artillery ammunition cut costs by 16–20%, with one supplier reducing its price by $1,000 per shell as a result. Fedorov’s office says that one artillery contract saved more than $100mn of budget money.

In another more aggressive and somewhat bizarre move, Fedorov has also subjected officials and contractors to polygraph tests as part of his procurement anti-corruption drive. Those who refused or failed were fired, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

The approach has inevitably created enemies inside a defence establishment that has long been dogged by procurement scandals, competing bureaucracies and powerful networks of well-connected suppliers.

And Fedorov continues to roll out his campaign digging ever deeper into the sprawling military octopus by putting war onto a spreadsheet. Fedorov drew up a list of 160 criteria to assess the military brigades that make up the fighting force, as well as creating a detailed system to track combat losses and their causes.

Putting a price on the infantry

Ukraine's most serious military problem is no longer simply weapons. It is people. Zelenskiy said that Russia’s last advantage is ballistic missiles during last week’s Ankara Nato summit, but sotto voce, Bankova also admits it biggest weakness is the lack of manpower.

When Fedorov became defence minister he told parliament that about two million Ukrainians were wanted for avoiding mobilisation and around 200,000 serving soldiers were absent without leave.

As IntelliNews reported, Russia has a problem finding enough volunteers to fill its ranks, but Ukraine’s problem is keeping the soldiers it has pressganged into services from its brutal “busification” compulsory conscription campaign. Ukrainian prosecutors had opened approximately 311,000 criminal cases for desertion and unauthorised absence since the start of the invasion, with more than half of those cases opened since the beginning of 2025.

Fedorov has taken a pragmatic approach to the problem of the large-scale desertions from the front lines. Rather than simply punish them, Fedorov has backed mechanisms allowing soldiers who left their units to return to service and choose a new unit through the “Army+ digital” system. Thousands have applied to return, according to the defence ministry.

His ministry is also preparing a partial discharge process from late 2026 for some soldiers who have served since 2022 or earlier, taking into account both length of service and time spent in combat.

"We will introduce a calculator that will enable every service member to see when they may become eligible for discharge," Fedorov said.

The army has been fighting for more than four years. Some soldiers have served since the opening weeks of the invasion with no clear date for demobilisation. They complain they are exhausted, while Russia has been recruiting some 30,000 fresh troops every month, enough to allow for rotations away from the front and replace those killed and wounded.

Fedorov's response has been characteristically transactional. Rather than relying primarily on patriotic appeals and large cash payments, the government is introducing fixed-term contracts, clearer rules on discharge and sharply higher pay for the soldiers doing the most dangerous jobs.

Fedorov has taken a leaf out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook, who pays sign up bonuses worth a year's worth of income and monthly salaries that are multiples of an average salary. Under the new system in Ukraine, infantry personnel can earn an average UAH300,000 a month ($6,700) while assault troops can receive as much as UAH460,000, or more than $10,000 – a fortune by Ukrainian standards, where the average monthly salary is on the order of $700 a month.

"That is why we have proposed the highest pay in the world for infantry and assault troops," Fedorov said, which is true if taken as a multiple of average salaries. "Through my conversations with soldiers, I came to understand that they should be earning significantly more."

Even with significantly higher pay, Ukraine still simply doesn’t have a large enough pool of military aged men to draw on for fresh recruits, which is why Fedorov is looking to the international labour market to make up the deficit.

In another leaf from the Russian as well as the US playbook, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is opening recruitment to licensed private military companies (PMCs). The Russian armed forces in Ukraine were supplemented by the infamous Wagner forces controlled by Evgeny Prigozhin that played a key role in the fall of the strategically important city of Bakhmut in 2023. The US also used the Blackwater PMC to provide assault troops in the Iraq war. The use of mercenaries mutes public criticism if casualty rates in an offensive are high. The Ukrainian government has discussed paying recruiters around UAH300,000 – more than $7,000 – for each foreign soldier successfully enlisted, the Ukrainian press reports. Fedorov has suggested foreigners could eventually fill 30–50% of infantry and assault vacancies.

"If remuneration increases, it will also help attract more foreign volunteers, who can then strengthen our frontline," he said. "They can also reinforce assault units."

Once again Fedorov is applying business logic to a military problem. If Ukraine does not have enough infantry, it must change the price, the contract and the recruitment mechanism until supply increases.