It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that a defence minister wouldn’t go down without a fight. As thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets across the country on Thursday to protest President Volodymyr Zelensky’s abrupt – and largely unexplained – decision not to reappoint popular Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov in a sweeping government overhaul, the man himself held a press conference in Kyiv to launch an unusually public attack against the person he held responsible for his forced resignation: Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces. Standing in front of a slick black slide-deck showing Ukrainian drones sweeping across the battlefield, the 35-year-old Fedorov told reporters that the nation’s top general had been systematically thwarting his efforts to implement much-needed reforms within the armed forces. "Instead of figuring out how to defeat Russia asymmetrically – which is the commander-in-chief's task – he figured out how to split the country," he said, dressed in his trademark tech-bro T-shirt and jeans. "In this configuration, I personally don't know how to win the war."
'Thousands of people are still dying over a few meters of ground' in Ukraine
