On August 19, the Ukrainian parliament voted overwhelmingly to confirm Ukraine’s new defense minister, ending weeks of uncertainty at a crucial phase of the war. For more than a month, Ukrainians had taken to the streets of Kyiv and other cities to protest President Volodymyr Zelensky’s firing of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. His successor, Yevhenii Khmara, is a special operations officer, best known for leading Operation Spider’s Web, the successful attack on Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russia.

But the political fallout from this summer’s upheaval is not over. The removal of Fedorov, whom many Ukrainians considered highly effective, set off a series of decisions by Zelensky to reshuffle the cabinet, and more consequentially, the heads of military and law enforcement agencies. Shortly after dismissing his defense minister, Zelensky sought to quell the public backlash by also firing Oleksandr Syrsky, the unpopular commander of the armed forces. As a result, the president was simultaneously replacing the two figures—the defense minister and the head of the military—officially responsible for Ukraine’s defense against Russia. That this was happening at the very moment Ukraine was gaining the advantage on the battlefield has made the changes all the more fraught.

For one thing, the large-scale protests themselves mark a new stage in Zelensky’s relationship to the electorate. Unlike any previous protests since the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians directly challenged the president’s handling of the war, introducing a dynamic that is unlikely to go away. Perhaps even more consequential, on the eve of the parliament’s vote on Fedorov’s successor, Fedorov released a controversial video address in which he declared that Ukraine needed a “system reboot” and called for wartime elections—the first time that not merely a prominent Ukrainian figure but a member of Zelensky’s inner circle and one of his former closest allies had done so. Until now, most Ukrainians have dismissed the prospect, since elections cannot be held while the country is under martial law. 

Amid these developments, something else has become increasingly clear: one of the unforeseen consequences of Ukraine’s transition to drone-centered warfare has been the expansion of civil society in new ways. The embrace of a decentralized, technology-driven defense strategy has required new forms of co-operation between military and civilians, giving far more people a stake in matters of national security and military strategy. And that has created a new reality for the country’s leadership.

A crucial factor driving the events of this summer is the evolution of the military confrontation with Russia into a drone war. This reality, which began to take hold in 2024, has accelerated Ukraine’s transition from foreign-supplied to domestically produced weapons: some 95 percent of drones are now assembled inside the country. Moreover, although Ukraine remains heavily reliant on its scarce supply of American interceptors to defend against ballistic missile attacks, it is far less dependent on foreign systems and intelligence than it was at the start of the war. The shift to a drone-centered battlespace has fundamentally altered combat tactics, the expertise required of soldiers, and the way arms are purchased. It has also rendered some kinds of legacy systems, such as armored vehicles and short-range artillery, increasingly obsolete.

Yet it is not the drones themselves that have made the shift so dramatic. To exploit the full potential of unmanned warfare, Ukraine has adopted an integrated digital architecture linking unmanned platforms with situational inputs and intelligence. It has also pursued an unprecedented level of digital coordination, as well as decentralized production and procurement of weapons and of digital technologies themselves. Fedorov was one of the key architects behind the deployment of this drone infrastructure. Unlike many other officials or military leaders, he not only possessed an acute understanding of the battlefield, the weapons deployed in it, and the data streaming from it, but he also had the ability to build, coordinate, and continually upgrade a comprehensive digital system to manage it.

Although he served as defense minister for only six months, Fedorov had driven this shift as the head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, a government agency he created in 2019 and ran until 2026. Drawing on a team of specialists, the agency had set out to replace traditional bureaucratic procedures across government with more efficient digital platforms; a secondary goal was reducing corruption. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Fedorov’s team became a driving force within the government for Ukraine’s drone program. Since the acquisition of drones initially fell outside of formal procurement, the agency was able to largely run the process through its own “Drone Line” initiative. At the same time, it began building a new digital infrastructure to manage drone warfare.

Some of these capabilities, such as Delta—a cloud-based system for managing........

© Foreign Affairs