Ukraine warned that Ukraine is slowly losing the war and has months, not years, to change course, according to the ex-Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in an exclusive interview with Reuters on August 25.

"I think that there's now a turning point which will determine our future trajectory, but it looks as though we're gradually, slowly losing," Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview published online. He added that Ukraine still had "every chance" of winning but urgently needed a plan for how to end the war.

It is a considerable departure from Kyiv's official line, and echo’s the controversial conclusion that the war had become a stalemate made by former commander-in-chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi in 2023 after the failed summer offensive that put the cat amongst the pigeons at the time and lead to his eventual dismissal by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Fedorov's assessment is part of the escalating conflict with his former boss, Zelenskiy and a direct challenge to the president’s authority. Fedorov has caused a scandal by insisting that he be reinstated or face mass protests and has called for presidential elections, an idea that Zelenskiy dismissed as it would cause a “tsunami” if attempted. The challenge comes as Zelenskiy is losing ground in the polls in the face of multiple crises, including a lack of air defence ammo as a Russian winter bombardment looms and corruption scandals surrounding Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, metastasise.

Fedorov was the mastermind behind this year’s strategy of taking the fight into Russia using Ukraine’s new medium- and long-range drones to strike at Russian supply lines to the frontline and it’s oil refineries. But he was sacked in a surprise government reshuffle last month, connected to the mushrooming corruption scandal being carried out by National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) that has caught up many in Zelenskiy’s inner circle.

It is not that Ukraine lacks weapons, said Fedorov. What is lacks is a strategy - no overall vision for winning a war that has dragged into its fifth year. Fedorov blamed a failure to innovate and government institutions without the political independence to fix the problems. Entrenched corruption and patronage networks, he said, are holding the country back, and said Zelenskiy had “questions to answer” about the stealing of millions of dollars by his colleagues in the presidential office. On August 25, a court sets bail at $448,000 for Zelensky's ex-deputy chief of staff Iryna Mudra who is charged with racketeering along with another dozen people connected to the presidential administration. Mudra said she didn’t have that kind of money and is being held in pre-trial detention, although size of the bail and the terms of her incarceration were significantly reduced by the judged at her arraignment hearing.

The presidential office hit back saying that Fedorov had been positive about the conduct of the war while he was running the ministry, and that the only thing to have changed since is his own status. Fedorov’s call for fresh elections has been met with a muted response, with many lawmakers questioning the wisdom of holding elections in the midst of a war – technically banned by the Constitution anyway – and say his motivations have more to do with personal ambition than any concern for the country.

Russia is hitting Ukrainian factories and warehouses with dozens of ballistic missiles a month, most of which Ukraine cannot intercept because its interceptors have run low. Russia is taking less ground than it did last year but is still moving forward in the Donbas, against the increasingly thinly spread Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) infantry positions manned mostly by unmotivated conscripts. As IntelliNews reported, kilometre-wide holes have appeared in the lines, allowing small units of Russian soldiers to infiltrate behind AFU positions and attack from the rear – a tactic the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) is using to increasingly good effect.

Ukraine, in turn, has scaled up deep strikes in an increasingly brutal tit-for-tat missile war that have hit military plants, badly damaged refineries and produced second wave of the fuel crisis inside Russia. On August 25, Ukrainian drones hit the Amur Gas Chemical Complex, a flag ship $10bn petrochemical joint venture between Russia’s SIBUR (60%) and China’s Sinopec that went up in flames.

Fedorov repeated his plans to fix Ukraine’s military problems using high tech solutions: autonomous drones guided by artificial intelligence, cheap interceptors to stop the air attacks, and a Ukrainian ballistic missile programme. Ukrainian manufacturers are already working on all three, but Fedorov argued that the Defence Ministry needs to coordinate their programmes.

"Technologies exist already which could completely stop the Russians, but our absence of vision ... means we do not apply them," he said, setting out a front line covered by electronic sensors with drones in the air and on the ground doing the work people currently do. He puts the Ukrainian state's overall performance at "5% effectiveness".

He also claims paternity of this summer's most effective Ukrainian operation - the drone campaign against Russian fuel and military logistics in occupied southern Ukraine - and says there is a window of only “a few months” to press on with isolating the Crimea before Russia works out how to counter the AFU’s strategy.

The sharpest exchange was about money: the two sides are a factor of five apart on the same budget. Fedorov front-loaded spending earmarked for the second half of 2026 to pay for that campaign, which has blown a $27bn hole in this year’s budget.

During this year’s Independence Day celebrations Zelenskiy called on allies for more money and missiles, adding that donor-dependent Ukraine has no way of filling the budgetary shortfall. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the same day that the European Commission (EC) will fast track a €6.1bn tranche to tide Bankova over.

Fedorov says he has no idea where Zelenskiy deficit figure comes from: his own planning left a deficit of "around $5bn" by the end of the year, and he knew where it was coming from: savings on new procurement tenders and international support. "Perhaps the plan changed and new projects emerged that require such a budget," he said.

He maked a second allegation in passing that deserves more attention than it will get: when he arrived at the ministry he found department heads who had been appointed at the request of Ukrainian defence companies, to lobby from the inside for their own suppliers' interests. That is a description of procurement capture, from the man who ran the procurement. On of his first acts as minister was to conduct an audit of the procurement process, which uncovered a total of $1.4bn of “savings” that could be won by reorganising the procurement system.

Fedorov, 35 and a former tech entrepreneur, said that his crack down on corruption in the ministry and emphasis on tech solutions to improving the effectiveness of the AFU lead to a direct clash with the established military clique. His dismissal set off weeks of protests. Last week he became the first major figure to demand wartime elections, calling the crisis of governance "systemic".

But he seems to have lost a lot of public support in the last weeks. Polls have consistently shown little appetite for voting under fire. A poll at the end of July found 82% of Ukrainians still believed their country would win, though most expected the fighting to run into 2027 or beyond.

Martial law has banned elections since February 2022 and there are real logistical objections, which Fedorov waves away with a promise of innovative online solutions. Zelenskiy has said the call could destroy Ukraine as it fights, and suggested Fedorov is being pushed by “outside forces,” which Fedorov flatly denies. On August 26, reports emerged that a corruption investigation has been opened into his possible participation in the $100mn kickback scheme as part of Energoatom corruption scandal.

Out of a job, Fedorov says he plans to divide his time between the elections campaign and military technology ventures, including an investment fund he intends to raise capital for on a coming trip to the United States.