Nothing screams political impotence like a national leader losing control over key military appointments at the time of war. With an abrupt cabinet reshuffle, Volodymyr Zelenskiy tried to get rid a disloyal defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. But at the end of the day he was forced to sack a loyal commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, who happened to be Fedorov’s arch-rival. Adding insult to injury, Zelenskiy was also forced to replace him with Mikhailo Drapatyi who openly supported Fedorov in the conflict.

There was still a fair chance at the time of writing that Fedorov himself would be reinstated as defence minister.

Zelenskiy sacked Iulia Svyrydenko’s cabinet in its entirety, but the former prime minister barely features in the story which revolves around Fedorov. The reshuffle triggered open confrontation between Zelenskiy and political groups favoured by Ukraine’s main international backers - European governments, Western defence industries and Nato’s apparatus, as well as mainstream Western media. Protests were held in major cities, demanding that Zelenskiy fires Syrskyi and reinstates Fedorov.

But it’s not these average-sized rallies, unthreatening to public order and definitely not growing into a new Maidan, which made the Ukrainian president to back off and sacrifice a key ally. It was also hardly caused by several military commanders, including Drapatyi, who effectively mutineered against the president and the commander-in-chief by backing Fedorov. Zelenskiy has a few prominent military figures on his side, too.

What really caused Zelenskiy’s change of tack was the pressure from Ukraine’s Western allies upon whose support Zelenskiy’s Ukraine existentially relies on and who believe they have a majority stake in the enterprise Ukraine. This is the only kind of political support which the Ukrainian president can’t afford to lose.

Lame duck’s revolt

What Zelenskiy attempted to pull off by sacking the cabinet (prominently including Fedorov) was a revolt against the arrangement that emerged in the wake of the corruption scandal that rocked Ukraine last fall and centred on the president’s immediate entourage.

The corruption investigation, which effectively turned Zelenskiy into an obedient lame duck (and the main scapegoat once the war ends) was spearheaded by Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies, NABU and SAPO. Zelenskiy has zero control over both of them, but the two agencies are strongly influenced by Western governments which insisted on their creation in the first place. People like veteran Ukrainian political leader Iuilia Tymoshenko openly describe them as tools of external control.

In the wake of the corruption debacle last fall, Zelenskiy had to sacrifice his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who was immediately charged by NABU - in a clear signal aimed at the president himself.

Zelenskiy replaced Yermak with the former military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, a political heavyweight in his own right - more a tentative ally than a truly loyal grey cardinal. The corruption scandal made Zelenskiy primarily reliant on secret services and powerful warlord-like military commanders, like Azov movement leader Andriy Biletsky. It also elevated one of Ukraine’s darkest securocratic figures, Oleksandr Poklad, to the post of the first deputy head of SBU, Ukraine’s security service.

Poklad used to head SBU’s fifth directorate responsible for political assassinations and closely linked to the CIA, according to Washington Post and New York Times. Ukrainian media named him as the person behind the unsuccessful attempt to derail the corruption investigation against Zelenskiy’s friends by targeting NABU detectives in unrelated criminal cases.

In the latest cabinet reshuffle, Poklad was promoted once again - he became SBU’s acting chief, while the former chief, Yevhen Khmara, took over the defence ministry. What Zelenskiy was attempting to create in his revolt reminds of Vladimir Putin’s “vertical of power” that relies heavily on loyal secret services and doesn’t tolerate disloyal officials and political challengers, like Fedorov.

Ukraine’s latest new Superman

The ousted defence minister also owes his elevation from the post of digital transformation minister to that of defence minister to Zelenskiy’s corruption scandal. But soon after his appointment it became apparent that he couldn’t develop friendly relations with many of Zelenskiy’s key allies, prominently including Syrskyi.

Fedorov didn’t even try to be liked by Zelenskiy’s entourage correctly assuming that he has a more powerful patron. Soon after his appointment, the young minster emerged as the Western establishment’s latest Ukrainian darling, a tech wiz promising “it’s a kind of magic” solutions that could help defeat Russia.

The main source of his “magic” power is Palantir - the American tech giant which provides Ukraine with cutting-edge battlefield software and takes pride in being responsible for most of the targeting for Ukrainian drones that are now hitting infrastructure over a thousand kilometres deep into the Russian territory. Fedorov was Palantir’s prime contact ever since the company CEO, Alex Karp, first visited Kyiv in June 2022. Karp showed up in the Ukrainian capital again, in Fedorov’s company, last May when the campaign of deep and midrange drone strikes against Russia began to unfold.

This tentatively successful drone campaign has been central to the “turning tide” strategic communication campaign that unfolded over the last few months and strove to prove that Ukraine is suddenly having the upper hand in the conflict. That propaganda effort was propelled by the same international coalition of Ukraine’s backers (European governments, Western defence industries and Nato apparatus) and it seemingly succeeded in swaying its one-man premium target audience - Donald Trump. Judging by his statements during and after Nato’s latest Ankara summit on July 8 , he has bought into the idea that a little more escalation by Ukraine could result in Putin accepting peace on Western terms.

This effort was driven the same brand of magical thinking that made leading Western powers throw Ukraine under Putin’s bulldozer in 2022 instead of finalising the peace process accelerated by Putin-Zelenskiy summit in Paris in 2019 or using the chance of ending Russia’s all-out aggression at its inception during Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022.

It stems from the quasi-religious belief in the Western moral, economic and technological supremacy as well is in Russia’s civilisational inferiority, which makes proxy war a workable method of delivering a strategic defeat upon Russia without endangering Western economies and populations. It mirrors Trump’s delusions on Iran but on a far grander and infinitely more dangerous scale given Russia’s nuclear arsenal as well as economic and intellectual might.

In the mythological world of Ukraine war cheerleaders, there is always a “magic wand” in the shape of the latest cutting edge war technology and there is always a bunch of good, progressive, tech-savvy, Western-styled Ukrainians, like Fedorov and Drapatyi, who confront the corrupt Soviet-styled old guard (think Syrskyi), in order bring about the desired changes. It only takes providing the magic wand and a political lift to these new heroes to make Putin escape beyond the Urals, as Zelenskiy promised in a recent statement.

The problem is that this scenario has never worked, and it doesn’t seem to be working this time again. As far as magic wands go, Ukraine initially demonstrated tangible success with deep strikes knocking out Russian refineries and midrange strikes, causing blackouts and an acute deficit of fuel in the Russia-occupied Crimea. On the heels of that achievement, Zelenskiy announced a forty-day aerial campaign aimed at coercing Russia into peace on his terms.

The announcement came on June 26. Almost thirty days later, Russia’s fuel crisis is being visibly alleviated, while its slow-moving land offensive continues as before. Crucially, Moscow’s position peace settlement hasn’t moved one inch towards that of Ukraine. In fact, it has hardened after Moscow ditched the possibility was land swap compensating Ukraine for withdrawing its troops from northern Donbas.

But the scale of Russian aerial drone and missiles attacks has intensified to an extent that Ukrainian observers are now talking about their country entering the “total war phase” that could gradually render it virtually unliveable. At the time writing, Russian strikes have almost completely halted Ukraine’s import and export through the port of Odesa in a painful blow for the country’s grain and ore producers.

Meanwhile a prominent leader of Ukraine’s volunteer movement helping the army, Taras Chmut, has recently called on Ukrainians living in large cities to consider moving to the countryside or abroad before what many expect as the harshest winter for Ukraine since the start war, with most of its energy infrastructure destroyed by Russia.

Sleek presentation, dark reality

Perhaps Fedorov, Palantir and Western war planners they work have more methods of influencing up their sleeve, but the situation looks like replay of Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive, only with less ambitious expectations (the current target of freezing the conflict on the current frontline was anathema for the war cheerleaders back in 2023).

Fedorov might look like Luke Skywalker in A New Hope to Western audiences, but for Ukrainians he is the person who for the last half a year presided over the brutal mobilisation campaign, with violent press gangs hunting men in the streets and beating them into obedience before sending to the frontline, sometimes to death.

Fedorov pledged to reform the mobilisation but did nothing except glamorous presentations. His main plan of reform was to professionalise the army by raising salaries of the servicemen to the Russian level and replacing half of the stormtroopers with foreign mercenaries. Western taxpayers were of course supposed to foot that bill and of course they won’t.

This conundrum derives from the fundamental problem of Ukraine’s war effort as a whole. The war cheerleaders in the West want Ukrainians to fight a war that vast majority of them doesn’t want to fight. No amount of tech wizardry can change this fact. Riots against mobilisation officers in Lviv, a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, earlier this month indicate very clearly what a real new Maidan revolution may stem from, rather than from another Western media darling being sacked.

The bitter truth is there is no alternative to mobilisation in its current brutal form at all. Every new Ukrainian defence minister, no matter how tech-savvy and adored in the West, will be the person who sends the perpetually dwindling number of Ukrainian men captured by press gangs to die in stinky trenches for the dubious cause of delivering a strategic defeat upon Putin’s Russia.

It doesn’t help at all when new appointees promoted by the West say things like what Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief Drapatyi said in a number of interviews over previous - that people in Donbas, the region Ukraine is fighting not to lose in its entirety, are mostly criminals and that Russia doesn’t deserve to exist as a nation. Statements like only help to foment more conflict that’s already turning Ukraine into a wasteland.

What the conflict in Ukraine has shown is that the West in its current sorry state has reached perfection in winning what it calls “cognitive war”, that is in creating illusionary bubbles and myth-ridden echo chambers for multi-million audiences. But the enemy never gets defeated or pacified as if the war is a goal in itself rather than the very last argument that’s best avoided in almost every situation.

Leonid Ragozin is a freelance journalist based in Riga. Formerly at the BBC, Newsweek and Lonely Planet guides. He tweets @leonidragozin