Ukraine’s reformist defense Minister is out after six months. Earlier, his audit exposed $7.2 billion in defense overspending

Ukraine's youngest-ever defense minister is leaving after six months. Mykhailo Fedorov confirmed his departure on social media on 15 July, publishing a summary of what his team managed to do and what it did not.

The decision angered many Ukrainians, who are criticizing it widely.

"It was a great honor to serve the Ukrainian people as Minister of Defense," he wrote.

Fedorov is not a minor figure. He built Ukraine's "Army of Drones" program from volunteer workshops into production of roughly 200,000 drones a month, created the Brave1 defense-tech cluster, and secured Starlink for Ukraine days after the full-scale war by tweeting at Elon Musk.

He became the defense minister on 14 January 2026 at 34, with a mandate to turn the army into a machine-first, manpower-light force.

Earlier, he began with an audit that uncovered about $7.2 billion in overspending and put ministry officials through a lie detector tests, The Economist reported. His departure is the second at the top of Ukraine's defense-industrial structure in two days, following the exit of Ukroboronprom chief Herman Smetanin.

The warning sign came a week earlier. When Zelenskyy flew to the NATO summit in Ankara on 7 July — the biggest defense event of the month, where Trump promised Ukraine a Patriot license — Fedorov was not in Ukraine's delegation.

Reformer under fire

Among the results the outlet credits to him: moving part of procurement onto open tenders, which cut the price of 155mm artillery shells by 16% almost immediately.

Reforms that size make enemies. An official who exposes billions in overspending, subjects a ministry to polygraphs, and strips margins out of arms contracts by opening them to competition is removing money from people who were used to receiving it.

Fedorov's own scorecard

The summary Fedorov published is his own account of his tenure, a list of claimed results rather than an independent audit. By his telling, the Defense Ministry team:

Cut off Russian access to Starlink, sharply reducing Russia's ability to wage effective drone warfare. Took over a ministry with no budget, moved money forward from year-end allowances, and invested it in mid-strike, fiber-optic FPV, cheap reconnaissance, ground robots, interceptor drones, and deep-strike drones — buying more drones in four months than in all of the previous year.

Launched "Logistics Lockdown" as a separately funded program that, Fedorov says, cut Russian supply lines and began the isolation of Crimea, and continued the Drone Line financing that underwrites drone buys for the Unmanned Systems Forces.

Introduced 70% prepayment for purchases through the eBaly system on the Brave1 Market. Ran the first tenders for long-range artillery and hundreds of thousands of drones, which he says saves the state budget billions of dollars. Bought thousands of pickups, buggies, and ATVs for the army through a tender for the first time.

Integrated Pavlo Lazar into the Air Force and introduced an after-action review of every massed attack. Over that period, Fedorov says, drone interception rose from 83% to 91% and cruise-missile interception from 47% to 87%. Contracted PAC-2 GEM-T missiles for Patriot for the first time and applied for PAC-3 European loan.

Started a baseline drone-supply system so that, from July, every combat brigade and corps receives predictable drone deliveries without manual intervention, and launched grant programs for explosives and missile producers.

Began an unpopular transformation of military service: fixed-term contracts for all with defined service periods and deferrals, one of the world's highest infantry pay scales, an open foreign-recruitment market, and new tools to bring back soldiers who went AWOL.

Exit without stated reason

Fedorov did not say why he is leaving, and Zelenskyy had not announced a replacement or a new post for him at the time of publication. His confirmation followed reports that a wider Cabinet reshuffle is underway, with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal's government facing replacement.

His tenure had results independent of his own account. Ukraine's Defense Ministry codified 1,000 weapons samples in the first half of 2026, with the domestically made share rising to nearly 90% from 69.6% a year earlier. Ground robots ran 16,676 logistics and evacuation missions in June, up 122% since January. The counter-logistics campaign against Crimea that he funded is still running nightly.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense-industrial machine is scaling faster than at any point in the war. It is doing so while losing, in two days, both the head of its state arms conglomerate and the minister who ran its procurement.