Ukraine's ousted defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for elections while the war is still being fought, arguing Russia should not decide when Ukrainians choose a government.

The intervention came in a video address on August 18, hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy formally nominated acting defence minister Yevhen Khmara to the job on a permanent basis - and on the exact day Fedorov had set as his own deadline for being reinstated to it or else he would call for mass protests.

Fedorov said Ukraine needed a “legal, safe, and realistic mechanism” for holding a vote during a prolonged war, one that guaranteed ballots for soldiers, for the millions of Ukrainians who have left the country, and for people living in front-line regions.

“We must not let Putin decide when Ukrainians can choose their government,” he said. “Democracy is not a peacetime luxury. Democracy is part of what we are fighting for today.”

A minister sacked in July who insisted he did not want to be dragged into politics has ended up causing the worst political crisis of Zelenskiy’s presidency and the first direct challenge to his rule. The president has been facing a growing domestic political crisis and has been losing control of his own Servant of the People (SOTP) after his authority was undermined by the mushrooming Energoatom corruption scandal that has implicated nearly his entire inner circle of associates.

According to some polls Fedorov is a front runner to win an election if a vote were held now. Ukraine has not voted since 2019; martial law has suspended elections since February 2022, with the broad consent of a population that saw no way to run one. Fedorov has now put that assumption to the test.

 

Khmara is the new defence minister

The formal approval of Khmara's appointment goes to the Verkhovna Rada on August 19. Rada chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk confirmed the nomination had arrived and would be handled “in accordance with the Constitution of Ukraine and established parliamentary procedure”, as reported by Interfax-Ukraine. Zelenskiy also sent up Andrii Sybiha for the foreign ministry, the other post left vacant by July's reshuffle.

Sybiha is expected to have the numbers. Khmara is the harder sell. The draft resolution on his appointment was registered only late on August 18, hours before deputies were due to vote, and Ukrainian media have questioned whether a majority exists. One member of the ruling Servant of the People party put the problem bluntly to the broadcaster Suspilne: “For some MPs it's not a question for or against Khmara, it's against Fedorov: people demand Mykhailo Fedorov be returned; it's hard to ignore.”

There is a constitutional complication as well. Ukraine's law on national security requires a civilian defence minister, and Khmara is a serving officer. A veteran of the SBU security service, he commanded its Alpha special operations centre and oversaw the campaign of long-range drone strikes into Russia. He led the operation to retake Snake Island in 2022 and became acting head of the agency in January 2026, after Vasyl Maliuk stepped down.

Ukraine has fought a brutal tit-for-tat missile war in the last five weeks with an acting defence minister and no foreign minister at all after the Rada's refusal in July to rubber-stamp Zelenskiy's reshuffle – another step down for Zelenskiy’s relationship with his own deputies who hold a majority in parliament.

Fedorov blasts Zelenskiy

Fedorov's deadline was public and specific. In an interview with the blogger Serhii Sternenko posted on YouTube in early August, and reported by IntelliNews on August 9, he gave Zelenskiy until August 18 - the day parliament returned from recess and could vote on a replacement - to restore him to the ministry or face mass protests.

“If our goal is to stop the war, then we are fighting for me to have the authority to do so as Minister of Defence,” he said in that interview. “We have a point where we will understand whether this has been achieved or not.”

The deadline passed with a rival's name on the Rada's order paper. What Fedorov produced instead of a call to the barricades was a speech about accountability.

He argued that elections are not simply about casting ballots but give citizens a chance to assess those in power and decide whether they still have their trust, and he tied that to how wartime money is spent. Misused defence funds, he said, come straight out of the supply of drones, ammunition, electronic warfare systems and vehicles reaching the front.

“Power must mean responsibility,” Fedorov said. “If you received authority - be accountable for the result. If you received a budget - show what was accomplished. If you received a position - explain what you achieved.”

The extraordinary trust granted to the authorities in wartime, he added, was not “a license to act without explanation”. “People do not demand that the state never make mistakes,” he said. “But they have a right to the truth.” People, he warned, “cannot endlessly live in a state where they do not understand why certain decisions are made” - a plain reference to a reshuffle Zelenskiy has never fully explained.

“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia. We are fighting precisely because we want to remain a free European state. Therefore, we must find a legal, safe, and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to restore a full democratic process even amidst a prolonged war. This is complex. We need to guarantee the voting rights of our military. Of millions of Ukrainians abroad. Of people in frontline regions. We need to ensure the security of the electoral process, the independence of institutions, and trust in the outcome.”

Zelenskiy fourth in the polls

A Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey of 1,808 respondents, conducted between July 16 and 31, put trust in Fedorov at 63% against 16% distrust - a net balance of plus 46 points, the best of anyone tested. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former commander-in-chief now serving as ambassador to London, scored 66% trust and 24% distrust; military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov 61% and 22%. Zelenskiy came fourth on 56% and 38%. KIIS described the jump in confidence in Fedorov since May as the standout movement in the data.

A Socis poll of 2,000 people carried out between July 28 and August 2, with a margin of error of 2.6 points, converted that into votes. Zelenskiy led a hypothetical first round on 17.8%, with Zaluzhnyi on 17.1% and Fedorov third on 10.5%. Every plausible run-off went against the president: Zaluzhnyi would beat him 47.4% to 24.2%, Fedorov 43.4% to 24.7%, Budanov 39.5% to 26%. Zelenskiy beat only Petro Poroshenko and Andriy Biletsky.

A Rating Group survey taken on July 20 and 21, in the immediate aftermath of the sacking, had already registered the shift: Fedorov's trust rating rose 30 points, from 35% to 65%, overtaking Zelenskiy's 59%. Some 72% of respondents said they did not support the dismissal, against 5% who did and 17% who were indifferent.

Zelenskiy is reported to have weighed calling an election this autumn, martial law permitting, and to have dropped the idea once Zaluzhnyi signalled he would run.

Two months of anti-government protests

Fedorov’s supporter have taken to the street in the longest sustained protests Ukraine has seen since the invasion began. They started in mid-July, within days of the reshuffle, and entered a second month on August 16, when a couple of thousand people gathered at Kyiv's Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People and marched the length of Khreshchatyk to Ivan Franko Square. Placards read “Dialogue with the people”, “Fedorov = Defence Minister” and “Has Vova left the chat?”, a jab at the president. Kyiv Post counted 32 consecutive days of demonstrations across several Ukrainian cities.

However, in the last week the demonstrations have lost some momentum. After Zelenskiy conceded the protesters' other demand and dismissed commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, replacing him with the widely respected General Mykhailo Drapatyi, the movement lost its second target and much of its momentum. Daily mass gatherings became biweekly ones, then knots of around a hundred people in the square. On August 18, with the Rada back and the nomination pending, roughly 20 people rallied near parliament, chanting “Shame!” and “Servants of the people, come out to the people”.

“I've been feeling some total frustration and despair,” Dmytro Koziatynskyi, a war veteran and one of the organisers, said of the president's silence. “It's unclear why the president continues to ignore the protests and doesn't find even one sentence in his evening addresses for an appropriate response.”

Inside Bankova the demonstrations were dismissed as “cardboard protests”. The petition handed to a presidential representative at the August 16 march put responsibility where the protesters wanted it. “Given the duration, scale, and, in particular, the risks involved in holding protests during a full-scale war, we as a society believe that we have done everything we could to make ourselves heard,” it read.

From tech guru to administrator

Fedorov, 35, a technology entrepreneur with no military background, took the defence ministry in January 2026 and ran it like a startup. In six months he ordered a sector-wide audit that identified around $1bn of corruption, rebuilt procurement around open tenders, and pushed medium- and long-range drones as the instrument for hitting Russian refineries and supply lines. He was dropped in July's reshuffle after Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko's resignation brought down the whole cabinet.

He has consistently said the reason was money, not personality. “The reason is connected with procurement, tenders, to the fact that we began overhauling the processes in this area,” he told Ukrainska Pravda. “This caused significant dissatisfaction among many people, who then started constantly exerting influence and spreading negativity, not just around the president but across the broader media space.”

Zelenskiy's version is that Fedorov and Syrskyi had stopped speaking to each other. Fedorov denies a personal quarrel, calling it a clash of visions, and says the ministry never blocked a single General Staff decision.

He has turned down every alternative job offered since, in government and out of it - including, according to a friend quoted by The Times, an approach from Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR). “I have absolutely no moral right to be involved in anything else right now - to go into business or start something like that,” Fedorov said on August 6, adding that “without a definitive 'no', I believe we always have a chance”.

Corruption, meanwhile, has overtaken the war itself as the public's stated concern. A poll published this month found 49.3% of Ukrainians naming high-level government corruption as the biggest drag on the country, against 44.6% citing Russia's drone and missile campaign against infrastructure.

Whether Khmara clears the Rada on August 19 now matters less than what the past five weeks have established. Zelenskiy no longer has an automatic majority for a defence appointment, the most trusted figures in the country are all outside his government, and the man he sacked has stopped asking for his ministry back and started asking for a ballot.