Ukraine’s Defense Minister leaves post after just seven months

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhailo Fedorov has announced that he is leaving his post just seven months after arriving and in the middle of the war launched by Russia, when kyiv has managed to change the dynamics of the conflict with long-range attacks against Russian positions inside the country.

“It has been a great honor to serve the Ukrainian people as Minister of Defense,” Fedorov himself reported in a message in which he did not offer more details about his departure from the Ministry, which he arrived in January 2026, but he did take the opportunity to vindicate the achievements of his Department in the context of the war.

“We deactivated access to Starlink for the Russian forces; I took charge of a Ministry of Defense without a budget, I took a risk, I reallocated funds from the year-end payroll and invested them effectively in immediate attack capabilities; I launched the ‘logistical blockade’, which cut off enemy logistics and began the isolation of Crimea,” he listed, emphasizing that he has launched different drone initiatives that have been effective in the war scenario.

Regarding anti-aircraft defenses, an issue of utmost importance for Ukraine and on which the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, influences in international forums, Fedorov has claimed that the drone interception rate “increased from 83% to 91%”, while the interception of cruise missiles “shot up from 47% to 87%.”

Likewise, he has highlighted the contracts to acquire Patriot PAC-2 GEM-T and PAC-3 interceptors, among the twenty achievements that he has highlighted, which includes international contracts through the Contact Group for Ukraine that has confirmed 40,000 million in military support to kyiv for this year.

However, he has claimed that he began an “unpopular but vital transformation” of the Army, in a message in which he thanks his family and his team “for their tireless dedication 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

“I will continue working to fulfill the mission that I initially set for myself in the Ministry of Defense: defeat the enemy through asymmetry, the speed of innovation and the power of the organization,” indicated the former minister in his farewell in which he does not mention Zelensky, who for his part has not offered details nor has he commented on the departure of the head of Defense.

Fedorov, 35 years old and very popular for his technological and innovative profile, has already held the position of deputy prime minister and was minister of Digital Transformation from 2019 to 2023.