Mykhailo Fedorov’s warning that Ukraine appears to be slowly losing the war is most revealing as an argument about state capacity. The former defence minister is not primarily saying that Russia has an insurmountable advantage in weapons or manpower. He is saying that Ukraine is failing to convert its own technology, institutions and resources into a coherent system quickly enough.
In an interview published by Reuters on 25 August, Fedorov said the country still has every chance to win, but that a window of only several months remains for key decisions. He blamed the absence of an overall vision for victory, slow innovation, entrenched corruption, patronage networks and institutions that lack political independence. His most striking management judgment was that the Ukrainian state is operating at roughly 5% effectiveness.
That number is rhetorical rather than a measured performance indicator, but it captures the structure of his critique. Fedorov wants autonomous drones guided by artificial intelligence, low-cost interceptor missiles, a domestic ballistic missile programme and a sensor-dense battlefield designed to minimise the number of soldiers exposed at the front. Ukrainian manufacturers already work on many of those technologies. His argument is that the state is not assembling them into a unified operating model at sufficient speed.
There is an obvious tension in hearing that assessment from a man who ran the Defence Ministry for six months. Fedorov entered government’s defence core as a reformer associated with digital systems and rapid product development. On 23 July, he described his own tenure in markedly different terms, saying Ukraine had begun to seize the initiative for the first time in years and had created a window to push Russia toward peace through strength.
A month later, the same concept of a window has become a warning. The presidential office made the contrast explicit in its response to Reuters: Fedorov had been positive about the war while he was minister, it said, and what had changed since was his personal status. That response moves the dispute beyond military analysis into the politics of accountability.
Mobilisation is one place where those two questions meet. Reform of Ukraine’s territorial recruitment centres was among the difficult structural projects discussed during Fedorov’s tenure. Military Ombudswoman Olha Reshetylova said after his departure that her office had spent months providing proposals and discussing changes with the ministry but had seen no effective progress beyond declarations. The criticism does not erase other reforms attributed to Fedorov, but it shows the difference between launching a reform agenda and forcing a large wartime bureaucracy to execute it.
Nor is there evidence that failure to reform the recruitment centres was, by itself, the reason for his dismissal. President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly acknowledged that Fedorov and then-Commander in Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi had failed to work effectively together, while problems on the battlefield, inside brigades and with mobilisation remained unresolved. Fedorov later said the conflict with the General Staff was the reason given to him, while suggesting that resistance from interests affected by procurement reforms may also have mattered.
The episode therefore cuts in both directions. Fedorov’s access to procurement data, force-generation problems and battlefield technology makes his assessment more significant than that of an outside commentator. Yet his former authority also means that any claim about a dysfunctional state raises a question about what he was able to change while holding one of its most powerful wartime offices.
The contrast with Oleksii Arestovych illustrates the politics of leaving government. After resigning as a non-staff presidential adviser in January 2023, Arestovych quickly began to question whether victory could be treated as guaranteed and stressed his new unofficial status. Fedorov’s trajectory resembles that shift in tone, though not necessarily in motive. The difference is institutional: Arestovych was a communications figure; Fedorov ran the ministry at the centre of procurement, mobilisation and military technology.
For Ukraine’s partners, the debate matters because state capacity determines the return on external support. Missiles, finance and industrial cooperation can only produce battlefield effects if institutions can procure, deploy and integrate them. Fedorov has now made that execution problem the centrepiece of his post-ministerial politics. Whether the diagnosis proves persuasive will depend on what Ukraine’s defence system does next, not on the sharpness of the 5% figure.