Kyiv, Ukraine – At 35, with no military background or battlefield experience, Mykhailo Fedorov seemed unfit to be wartime Ukraine’s defence minister.But he was acclaimed for his reforms while serving as Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, and his new duties included logistics, budgets, reforms, anticorruption measures and deals to secure multibillion-dollar Western aid or loans.After his appointment in January, Fedorov provided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a list of urgent problems and ways to solve them. He mentioned a “chaotic” management system, constant rotations of commanding officers, non-transparent distribution of arms and military equipment, bureaucracy, resistance to reforms from Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii’s General Staff of Armed Forces, decision-making based on loyalty and not data analysis, and “isolation” of effective commanders and proponents of reforms.Then on Wednesday, just seven months into his role, Fedorov was removed from his position by Zelenskyy. The changes that Fedorov was trying to bring about in Ukraine’s military had angered Syrskii. But Fedorov’s ouster appears to have angered Ukrainians even more — potentially presenting Zelenskyy with a political challenge.Rallies, relatively large by wartime Ukraine’s standards, have since erupted in Kyiv and key Ukrainian cities.“He’s a young, smart, educated person who proved with his previous job that he really is a reformer and can make Ukraine a nation of the future,” Taisiya, who rallied on Thursday in central Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.“He’s outstanding, because he’s a decent, honest person, and I believe him, and I’d like to actually see him as Ukraine’s president,” she said, withholding her last name for security reasons.Outgoing Ukraine Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov speaks during a briefing to journalists in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, July 16, 2026 [Dan Bashakov/AP Photo]The reformerTo be sure, even while Fedorov was heading the defence ministry, the actual combat planning and operations were helmed by Syrskii, a 60-year-old four-star general who won praise for defending Kyiv and expelling Russians from northeastern Ukraine in 2022, but who was dubbed a “butcher” for his reported indifference to losses of soldiers.But away from the battlefield, Fedorov tried to transform what the Ukrainian military and its capabilities looked like.He began tech-driven reforms that appeared like Silicon Valley’s revision of the military playbook.