Ukraine’s military system is starting to collapse. Can changing generals save it? The fall of the commander-in-chief marks the moment when battlefield exhaustion became an open political crisis Kiev, the evening of July 21, 2026. For the fifth day in a row, protests continued in the capital and in several regional centers of Ukraine. Protesters gathered outside the Presidential Office building and in the square outside the Ivan Franko Theater, as well as in Kharkov, Lviv, Odessa, Dnepr, and Nikolaev. Since July 16, they demanded two things:
the reinstatement of Mikhail Fedorov as minister of defense and the dismissal of then-commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Aleksander Syrsky. The protesters portrayed Fedorov as an advocate of modernization and Syrsky as a representative of the old, “Soviet” military governance model. That evening, during his daily address, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky made an announcement. “I have decided that Mikhail Drapaty will become the new commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Together with Mikhail, Evgheny Khmara, and Pavel Palisa, we have determined how the configuration of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine should be updated,” he said. The protests that
began after Fedorov’s dismissal on July 15 were a rare example of open public discontent with the government’s personnel policy during wartime. They revealed lingering contradictions within the Ukrainian military-political leadership and resulted in personnel changes at the highest military level. Read more Before Gagarin, there were dogs: The forgotten pioneers of space War of attrition When Syrsky assumed the post of commander-in-chief in February 2024, he already had experience in several key episodes of the war. However, even at the start of the war, the downside of his approach became apparent. The ultimately unsuccessful defense of Bakhmut, which Syrsky oversaw as ground forces comman
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