KYIV, Ukraine — Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s recently ousted defense minister and one of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s longest-serving political allies, has called for wartime elections, signaling his clearest break yet with the administration that launched his political career.
In a nine-minute video released Tuesday, Mr. Fedorov said Ukraine faced a “systemic crisis of governance” and argued that Russia should not be allowed to determine how long Ukrainians go without choosing their leaders.
“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” the 35-year-old former minister said. “We must find a legal, safe and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war.”
He stopped short of demanding an immediate vote or announcing a presidential bid.
Instead, he acknowledged some of the formidable obstacles to holding an election while Russia occupies roughly a fifth of the country, millions of Ukrainians live abroad and about 1 million are serving in the military. Ukrainian law bars national elections under martial law.
Yet the speech went far beyond election logistics: Without mentioning Mr. Zelenskyy by name, Mr. Fedorov attacked corruption, opaque decision-making and a system in which loyalty is rewarded over competence.
“The old system lives by its own rules too often. It protects itself. It is scared of change,” he said, arguing that corruption during wartime directly deprives the military of resources needed to fight Russia.
For a man who was an architect of Mr. Zelenskyy’s 2019 digital campaign and then spent nearly seven years at the heart of his government, the speech amounted to an extraordinary political turn.
Mr. Fedorov was dismissed in July after just six months as defense minister. He had arrived at the ministry promising to apply the data-driven methods he championed as Ukraine’s digital transformation minister to procurement, drones, mobilization and military management.
His tenure quickly brought him into conflict with then-Commander in Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi. After his removal, Mr. Fedorov accused the military leadership of blocking reforms and said he did not know how Ukraine could win the war under the existing arrangement.
Mr. Zelenskyy said the two men could no longer work together.
Mr. Fedorov has also argued that his attempts to introduce greater competition into defense procurement threatened entrenched commercial interests and contributed to his dismissal.
His dismissal triggered rare wartime street protests in Kyiv and other cities. Demonstrators demanded his return and increasingly called for Gen. Syrskyi’s removal as well.
Olena Tregub, secretary-general of the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission, or NAKO, has said Mr. Fedorov introduced greater use of battlefield effectiveness data into procurement decisions, although broader procurement reforms predated his tenure.
Mr. Zelenskyy dismissed the army chief days later and replaced him with Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, a younger commander viewed as more receptive to technological and organizational reform. The president also offered Mr. Fedorov another senior role overseeing military technology, but the former minister declined.
The protests continued. A march in Kyiv on Sunday, one month after Mr. Fedorov’s dismissal, again drew roughly 2,000 people.
Until this week, however, Mr. Fedorov kept his distance from those demonstrations and continued to leave open the possibility of working with Mr. Zelenskyy.
“In that video yesterday, he essentially virtually joined the protesters,” Ms. Tregub told The Washington Times. “He now presented himself pretty much as a challenger of Zelensky, but still in a very, I would say, not very direct manner.”
That ambiguity, she said, may also become his biggest political weakness.
“He didn’t say a single bad word about the president,” Ms. Tregub said. “He was talking about corruption, about a bad system of governance. But the system has certain names, and he didn’t name a certain name.”
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies announced a major investigation involving current and former officials and alleged laundering of roughly $3 million. Mr. Zelenskyy fired Iryna Mudra, a deputy head of the presidential office, after investigators searched her home. She has not been publicly named as a suspect, and investigators have not implicated Mr. Zelenskyy.
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