President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ouster of his longtime aide-de-camp and tech wizard as defense minister could freeze Ukraine’s remarkable rise in drone and robotic warfare and its advances in repelling the Russian invaders, says a world-leading expert on the war and its contending commanders and strategies.
Mykhailo Fedorov, architect of super-speed innovations in automated aerial bombers, remotely piloted submarines packed with explosives, and robotic battlefront soldiers, turned the tides of conflict with the Russian war machine, says Peter Dickinson, an acclaimed scholar at the Atlantic Council, one of the top defense and diplomacy think tanks in Washington, DC.
But Fedorov has also infuriated old guard military leaders across Ukraine, many trained in Soviet war strategies of the last century, with his technological transformation of the democracy’s armed forces, he told me in an interview.
Dickinson, who has chronicled Russia’s attempt to crush and annex Ukraine since the first days of the invasion, via the influential magazine UkraineAlert, says Fedorov has been the unquestioned commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s transmutation into a drone-war superpower.
Formerly Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Fedorov was the supreme strategist of sensational drone strikes that blasted strategic jet fighters across Russia, decimated its Black Sea Fleet around occupied Crimea and blitzed the invaders across ground battles.
Just days after Russian tanks and troops crashed across the border, Fedorov persuaded thousands of cutting-edge hacktivists around the world to join his international IT Army – a subterranean force that began pelting the websites of the Russian government.
When Moscow targeted its first missile barrages to destroy telecommunications towers and internet infrastructure across Ukraine, Fedorov sent an urgent digital SOS to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, via Twitter, asking him to supply Starlink satellite stations that would plug the country back into the Web.
“@elonmusk,” Fedorov pleaded, “while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations.”
In a flash, Musk messaged Fedorov that he had activated his broadband-beaming satellites for free service across the country, and began airlifting thousands of Starlink terminals despite the armed rockets that were still bombarding Ukraine and the barrage of Kremlin threats against Musk himself for aiding the besieged democracy.
Now, Fedorov’s abrupt, surprise dismissal is casting jet-black clouds over Ukraine’s metamorphosis into a super-tech fighting force.
“The removal of Fedorov creates grave risks for the Ukrainian war effort,” Dickinson told me.
“He was the driving force behind Ukraine’s focus on drone warfare and a tech visionary who understood the rapidly changing military environment and the need for constant innovation.”
“Without him in a leadership role, there is a very real danger that Ukraine’s technological advantages will erode and the country will find itself trapped in an uneven war of attrition against a far larger and more conventionally powerful enemy.”
Since the start of Russia’s invasion, Fedorov has been at the forefront of the tech race to develop a fusillade of increasingly sophisticated drones and anti-drone interceptors that can be mass produced at high speeds – all at prices that are just a tiny fraction of their American counterparts.
Fedorov’s expertise in leading-edge aerial arms and defenses, and across the realm of technology, Dickinson says, has “helped build bridges with international partners and inspired confidence in Ukraine’s defense tech sector.”
At the same time, Fedorov has built a worldwide web of ties with global tech leaders. “This has proved a huge asset for Ukraine.”
“It is no surprise that immediately following news of his dismissal, a number of international tech giants suggested possible cooperation.”
Across the Ukrainian government, including even its iconic president, Fedorov has formed the closest alliance with Elon Musk. He persuaded Musk to keep supplying Ukraine with Starlink stations despite Moscow’s dispatching envoys to UN forums in New York and Geneva who threaten to begin shooting down SpaceX satellites in low Earth orbit, and its deploying advanced Su-34 bomber jets and missile brigades to destroy Starlink transceivers across Ukraine.
The onetime minister’s position as Ambassador Extraordinary with tech titans stretching from Silicon Valley to the SpaceX Starbase launch center, and the collapse of that role, could likewise dent Ukraine’s diplomacy in this sphere.
In a spectacular sign of his stellar image and popularity, Fedorov’s young acolytes across a constellation of campuses and star tech start-ups have begun staging protest marches in major cities Ukraine-wide to demand that he be reinstated as defense minister, taking to the streets despite the ongoing aerial bombardments being launched by the Kremlin.
“In the context of a country fighting for national survival in an existential war, the current protests must be regarded as significant,” Dickinson says.
Unlike the land of the invaders, where government critics can be sent to sub-zero Arctic prison camps, and even assassinated via diabolical state-concocted poisons, young demonstrators who have staged waves of protests for democracy are heralded across Ukraine, which has over the last dozen years created a pantheon of icons marking their bravery and utopian ideals.
Their street protests across the 2000s ultimately gave rise to future freedom fighter Volodymyr Zelensky being elected president in 2019, with a hyper-tech campaign across Ukraine’s cybersphere that was engineered by Web wunderkind Mykhailo Fedorov.
At the same time, Dickinson says, it’s important to keep the current cascade of protests in perspective.
“At this stage we are talking about a few thousand people among a wartime population that numbers tens of millions.”
While leaders across the Western democracies have praised earlier Ukrainian protesters calling for liberalization and stronger ties with the European Union, they are unlikely to publicly back the new demonstrators demanding Fedorov’s reinstatement, Dickinson predicts.
“Traditionally, Ukrainian protests have succeeded when accompanied by significant international pressure from Ukraine’s Western partners.”
“But Western governments are not likely to intervene on this occasion as they view the appointment of ministers to be a strictly domestic matter for the Ukrainian authorities.”
Fedorov’s fall is also ascribed to his irking the military establishment by making the procurement of arms more transparent and democratic, even empowering drone pilots along the front lines to order their own automated aircraft online, via iPhones or laptops, bypassing traditional state-controlled supply channels.
That was part of his wider goal of sending endless waves of bomb-carrying drones and robots to hit Russian encampments in a bid to sharply reduce Ukraine’s casualties.
“Fedorov clearly angered Ukraine’s military old guard by challenging their dominance of military matters and making clear that he felt their expertise was no longer relevant.”
“He believed that the nature of warfare has shifted decisively toward unmanned systems and saw it as his role to drag the entire Ukrainian military away from the Soviet past and into the 21st century,” Dickinson says.
“His efforts to introduce transparency into the notoriously murky world of military procurement made him particularly unpopular” across the reactionary faction in Ukraine’s defense hierarchy.
“All this put him in direct conflict with the army old guard and its many associated vested interests.”
Since his firing, Fedorov has trumpeted that he has no intention of exiting his sensational role in the defense of Ukraine, or limelight on the global stage, quietly.
While staging a no-holds-barred press conference in the capital to outline his grievances with conservative generals – right after he lost his power struggle with them – Fedorov also created a digital shrine to his wartime triumphs via the messaging platform X.
Fedorov and his band of allies, he says, sped to create “mid-strike capabilities, fiber-optic FPVs, low-cost reconnaissance, ground robotic platforms, interceptor drones, and deep-strike drones.”
FPVs, or first-person-view drones, transmit a live video feed back to a remote pilot wearing a headset, who could be positioned a city or a continent away while releasing compact bombs on optimum targets.
Under his leadership, Fedorov says, “The drone interception rate rose from 83% to 91%, and the cruise missile interception rate soared from 47% to 87%.”
While he “signed a contract to procure [Sweden’s vanguard] Gripen fighter jets,” he adds, he also “launched the Defense AI Center A1 to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence on the battlefield,” all while helping secure $40 billion in funding from the 40-nation Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
“I will continue to work toward the mission I originally brought to the Ministry of Defense,” Fedorov vowed, “defeating the enemy through asymmetry, the speed of innovation, and the power of organization.”
Peter Dickinson, one of the Atlantic Council’s foremost scholars on Ukraine, its leadership and its evolution into a top-ranked European military power, says despite the latest signs of Fedorov’s mass popularity, it’s unlikely the onetime Minister of Digital Transformation might be considering his own run for the presidency when the next, post-war election is held.
Fedorov’s ode to his own victories as defense minister on X might be aimed at persuading Zelensky to reverse his being fired, but not at challenging Zelensky for the presidency in a future race, Dickinson says.
“I imagine at this point Fedorov wants to put his remarkable achievements on record without any specific goals in mind.”
“He may believe that Zelensky could be persuaded to change his mind, but primarily I think he wants to be recognized for his exceptional efforts.”
“There is no suggestion that he has any presidential ambitions,” Dickinson says.
“Indeed, he is known as a Zelensky loyalist who has reliably supported Zelensky since the presidential campaign of 2019.”
