The Fedorov protesters lost. But they backed a man for what he built, not what he promised—and that may be new in Ukraine.

On 19 August, veteran and civic activist Dmytro Koziatynskyi thanked everyone who had taken part in the month-long protests to bring back Mykhailo Fedorov, and said it was all worth it. Koziatynskyi was one of the organizers of rallies across Ukrainian cities demanding the reinstatement of Fedorov, the defense minister widely credited with driving Ukraine's military-tech overhaul, after he was abruptly dismissed on 14 July.

His firing detonated a month of protests because Fedorov was no ordinary minister: the 35-year-old reformer had exposed billions in defense overspending and built the drone programs many Ukrainians saw as their best chance in the war, so his removal read, to those in the streets, as the old system protecting itself.

Koziatynskyi's decision to end his protest came after Parliament voted 312 that same day to appoint Yevhenii Khmara as defense minister. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy did not meet the protesters' main demand: the return of Fedorov.

"It is a pity that we were never able to establish a dialogue between the authorities and society. I hope this issue will be resolved over time because, in my view, the lack of communication was the root cause of these protests," Koziatynskyi writes.

But the rallies may leave Ukrainian society with something that outlasts the outcome of one personnel decision, Anatolii Romaniuk, a political scientist at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, told Euromaidan Press. The protesters lost: Parliament appointed Yevhenii Khmara as defense minister, not Mykhailo Fedorov. Yet the "cardboard Maidan," as the protests were termed for their abundance of handmade signs, may have revealed the beginnings of a broader shift in Ukrainian society. Romaniuk believes its significance lies in why people took to the streets: to support a politician not because of what he promised them, but because of what he had already done.

Actions, not words

Romaniuk believes Ukrainian society has long lived under what he calls a "political curse": large numbers of Ukrainians repeatedly bought into populist promises from politicians offering things that were simply unrealistic.

He points to every Ukrainian election from 2004 through 2019, arguing that the share of populist promises only increased. Experts could see that many of them were impossible to fulfill, he says, yet voters continued to support politicians who made them. Romaniuk points to a promise from the 2019 election campaign that Ukrainian wages would overtake Poland's—at a time when the average salary in Ukraine was around $400 a month, and Poland's was roughly three times that.

The 2026 protests may represent a change in perspective, he argues: people backed a politician not for what he said he would do, but for what he had already done.

Fedorov's signature result was an audit—in his first months, his ministry exposed roughly $7.2 billion (300 billion hryvnia) in defense overspending, and that figure became the movement's rallying cry. "The audit showed 300 billion in theft. They removed the auditor, not the thieves," read one cardboard sign in Lviv.

The protesters were defending a record: open procurement built on the Brave1 marketplace, where frontline units order drones directly from certified manufacturers; a first competitive tender that cut 155mm shell prices by 16%; and, above all, Fedorov's bet on robotization—technology instead of manpower—that many Ukrainians saw as their best chance against a larger Russian army, a way to spend drones rather than lives. Fedorov was removed while he was implementing the reform, amid a conflict with then Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi.

"If this change in perspective continues, we will get out of the situation where we have become hostages to a growing wave of populism that would otherwise simply overwhelm us in the next elections. Because the degree, or the level, of populism in the 2019 elections was already very high. It was unrealistic," Romaniuk says of the protests' possible longer-term effect.

The protesters were "for," not "against"

Romaniuk sees another distinction between these demonstrations and earlier protests in Ukraine's modern history: previous movements were built around being "against" something. This time, the demand was explicitly "for" something.

"If we recall the events of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and even last year's protests, they were 'against.' That is, they were against Yanukovych signing an agreement with Russia and refusing to sign the Association Agreement. They were against a decision made at the highest level in Ukraine to restrict the anti-corruption bodies," Romaniuk says, referring to former President Viktor Yanukovych, whose 2013 pivot away from the European Union set off the Euromaidan Revolution.

He argues that Ukraine has never before seen protests explicitly organized in support of a government official, making the Fedorov rallies a first.

At the same time, Romaniuk acknowledges the paradox: even protests framed as being "against" something almost always implied support for an alternative. In 2004, for example, Ukrainians protested the results of the second round of a falsified presidential election that had declared pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych the winner over his pro-European rival, Viktor Yushchenko. But by opposing those results, Romaniuk says, they were also supporting democratic elections.

The difference this time is that the "for" was clearly articulated. Protesters demanding Fedorov's return had an idea of the kind of Ukraine they wanted to see.

"In these protests, we have a situation where people are supporting the course pursued by Defense Minister Fedorov—the modernization of the army, changing approaches to warfare, and changing what the Ukrainian state should look like," Romaniuk says.

Dariia, a 22-year-old who attended the protests in Lviv, describes her reasons for joining them in similar terms.

"My motivation is to see changes in the country, to see justice, to see that young, progressive people who put technology ahead of human losses are leading us toward victory."

She says Fedorov was one of the people introducing reforms "from the very top of government all the way to the battlefield."

"And we really saw those changes," Dariia told Euromaidan Press. She credits Fedorov with the long-range drone campaign that has struck Russian refineries, defense plants, and Wildberries depots as far as Bashkortostan, some 1,300 kilometers inside Russia: "Our enemy finds ways to attack, and we must also search for new ways to respond. Fedorov, as defense minister, was the person finding ways to respond to these attacks, how to carry out deep strikes."

This year's cardboard protests could be a good start

Romaniuk cautions that it is still too early to speak of a change in Ukrainians' political culture. But he says he would like to see this episode become the beginning of one.

"I would like other people in power to also be judged by their results, by what they have done," he says.

A genuine pattern, he adds, could only be established if similar cases repeated themselves. For now, this remains one specific episode rather than a proven trend.

Dariia connects the rallies to her own experience of protesting more than a decade earlier.

"I remember the rallies in Mykolaiv in 2014 against the occupation regime in the east. Back then, it was five people with cardboard signs standing in the rain. My family was one of them. Nobody came out, nobody understood that position… It is nice to see that people in the south and east understand now," Dariia says.