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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

Ukrainian activists who spent a month calling for the former defense minister’s return have criticized the appointment of his successor. People rallying in Kyiv's Mariinskyi Park for the reinstatement of Mykhailo Fedorov as defense minister greeted the news of Yevhenii Khmara's appointment to the post with disappointment, Ukrinform reports.

The rally caps a month of protests over Fedorov's dismissal. People have gathered on Ukraine's streets since President Volodymyr Zelenskyy removed Fedorov amid a logistics-lockdown operation against Russia and successful strikes deep into its territory. Parliament approved Khmara despite the protests.

"Shame!" protesters reacted to the appointment

The crowd met the appointment with anger. They began chanting "Shame!" and beating drums as the news of Khmara's confirmation broke.

They said that the post "should belong to another person" and appealed to the Ukrainian government: "We greatly respect Khmara, but please, do not hide behind Khmara," the activists said.

"We demand dialogue"

The protesters framed their grievance as a lack of dialogue with the president. They chanted slogans including "We demand dialogue," "Do not destroy our future," "Dialogue, not ignoring," "Fedorov instead of Khmara," "Power is the people," and "Power is responsibility," and said there was no dialogue with Zelenskyy on the matter.

Some held placards reading "Return Fedorov," "Against Khmara," "Thank you for Drapatyi, return Fedorov," and others praising Fedorov's record on strikes against Russia.

The protest continues

The activists announced a pause and the next step. After the news of Khmara's appointment, they said they were ending this particular protest and called on people to come to Ivan Franko Square at 7 p.m., saying they plan to hold such actions there daily.

The day before the vote, Fedorov addressed Ukrainians, saying the country cannot remain without a fully appointed defense minister, but at the same time called for mechanisms that would allow elections to be held in full during martial law.

He did not name a specific proposal or answer the question of who exactly should launch this mechanism, adding only that "democracy cannot be a hostage to Russia."

He also stated that Fedorov declared a "systemic crisis of governance" in Ukraine and criticized the influence of private interests on the parliament's work, effectively hinting that the current leaders are ineffective.

On 16 July 2026, protesters took to the squares in Ukrainian cities with cardboard signs bearing the same demand in various forms: to reinstate Ukraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. The following day, protesters added a new demand: to dismiss Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Oleksandr Syrskyi. A few days later, Zelenskyy met the second demand—but not the first, which the protesters are still waiting on.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has been under martial law, which necessarily restricts democracy in order to centralize governance. The country is not holding elections, citizens’ rights are restricted, and the military has become one of the country’s key institutions. Under these circumstances, the President dismissed one of the most important figures in the military at the demand of street protesters.

These centralizing tendencies of wartime rule could lead either to “strengthening democracy” or to “strengthening authoritarianism,” political science professor Anatolii Romaniuk told Euromaidan Press—and this year's protests, he argues, show that society is reaching for more democracy. Ukrainians recognize the cardboard-sign protests as an expression of democracy while also worrying about what such developments mean for a country at war.

“The fact that the authorities took the protesters’ demand into account is good,” Romaniuk says. He considers this an important element of political culture.

More than three weeks on, the protests continue—smaller than at their July peak but daily, from Lviv to frontline Dnipro, now under a broader call for "dialogue and reforms" in the defense sector. Fedorov himself has declined to lead them: he told the New York Times he will not go into opposition during the war or be "artificially dragged" into politics, and has turned down every post the president has offered except the one he lost.

We stood, we stand, and we will stand

Not every protester can fully explain every aspect of the issue, but they all recognize a sense of injustice and feel compelled to speak out against it, Ukrainian photojournalist Stas Kozliuk says.

Romaniuk sees these handwritten, highly individual signs as evidence of personal agency.

“This is a form of self-expression—of a person's identity, views, and position. To me, the cardboard sign itself is a powerful marker. Not a professionally printed slogan, because once perfectly designed placards start appearing at protests, it usually means someone has commissioned them,” Romaniuk says.

Do we know who the people holding cardboard signs at the protests are? Probably not. According to Ukrainian analyst Vadym Denysenko, no one really knows who these protesters are. He argues that no comprehensive sociological research has been done on either last year's protests or the current wave.

“Who are these people? Do they have a political program? What is their vision of the future? Ultimately, do they see themselves entering politics? These are basic questions. The answers would cost a few tens of thousands of dollars, yet no political force has been willing to spend that money,” Denysenko wrote on Facebook.

Twenty-two-year-old Dariia, who came to the rally in Lviv on 24 July, believes that the protests will not simply disappear.

“I think people will stay for as long as it takes, until Fedorov is restored to a position where he can genuinely influence the current situation,” she says.

Among the protesters at the 24 July rally in Lviv was also a woman holding a cardboard sign that read: “Swap the POWs, not Fedorov.” She came there with her husband and child.

“I am originally from Kharkiv. My father is missing, so first of all I was against Syrskyi. Now I am already satisfied. But now we need Fedorov, because he is ‘technology, not people,’” the woman said.

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Strength and risk at the same time

Russia has sought to exploit the protests for its own purposes. It seizes on the fact that Ukrainians hold different views on the protests, amplifies divisions in public opinion, and presents them as evidence that the country is becoming ungovernable.

Writing for Ukrainska Pravda, media expert Oksana Moroz argues that the Kremlin has attempted to weaponize public discontent through coordinated information campaigns.

According to Moroz, Russia relied not only on artificially generated TikTok videos spreading narratives harmful to Ukrainian society but also on Telegram. There, she says, “a classic network of Russian or pro-Russian bloggers” circulated posts aimed, among other things, at discrediting the demonstrations. These bloggers promoted claims that the protests were orchestrated and that participants were being paid to attend.

Some demonstrators have responded to those accusations with humor. Protesters voluntarily bring candy, cookies, pastries, and other snacks to share with anyone attending, joking that this is the “salary” they supposedly receive for protesting.

Military Ombudsperson Olha Reshetylova argues that “a sense of injustice in society cannot be bought, fabricated, or created overnight through a social media post. It is the result of accumulated and unresolved problems.”

Where the line has to be drawn

Opinions within the military are divided. Some servicemembers have openly supported the protests despite pressure from their commanders. Others believe demonstrations of this kind are inappropriate and harmful under wartime conditions, says Reshetylova.

“Many people around me today — including combat officers — see the cardboard-sign protests as infantile, detached from reality, and unacceptable while the country is fighting a war. Although I disagree with some of the protesters' demands, I do not share that view,” she says.

Personnel changes in the military should be made in consultation with the officers responsible for the country’s defense, says MP and member of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Oleksandr Fedienko. He emphasizes that this reduces the risk of weakening the country’s defense capabilities due to inappropriate personnel changes.

Despite his positive view of the protests, Romaniuk warns that such pressure is dangerous in a country at war.

“During wartime, changing the military because of protests rather than professional assessments carries obvious risks. In this case, things ended well. But as a mechanism, it is dangerous. Someone could organize demonstrations demanding the dismissal of any official. That is where the line has to be drawn.”

Dariia, back at the Lviv rally, voiced her own doubt about whether President Zelenskyy would meet the demand:

“The pessimistic question arises: are they feeding us these little crumbs so that we calm down and forget about it? Many older people, for example, my parents, think that they will feed us a crumb of honey now, and then start stealing the budget again.”

Friday evening, 19:00, they met again. The crowd wasn't uniform: students, pensioners, whole families who'd come with small children, couples. A five-year-old girl in fluffy earmuffs held her own cardboard protest sign. A few soldiers among them. Several hundred people, loose across the steps beneath the Shevchenko monument, the poet's bronze hand open above them.

The mood was quiet, more communion than fury, people just standing together in the fading light. The signs were as diverse as the attendees. One sign, in green marker with a row of red hearts, read "Mykhailo Vasyliovych, we believe in you!!!" Another, block letters on brown card: "Fedorov is our Minister of Defense." A third, held high near the scaffolding: "Fedorov, minister of victory." The child's placard read simply: "My first placard."

Protests like this have been ongoing in cities across Ukraine since 16 July, amid President Zelenskyy's Cabinet shakeup that had the popular defense minister fired. Participants want Mykhailo Fedorov reinstated and say they will stay until their demand is granted.

Fedorov is not a career soldier: he built Ukraine's Diia digital-state platform and, as digital-transformation minister, drove the drone-procurement push that turned cheap unmanned systems into the country's most-used weapon against Russia's invasion. To the people on the square he is the man who stands for winning the war with technology rather than with bodies—and his removal, after barely six months at the ministry, landed as that bet being called off.

A year ago the same kind of crowd defended institutions: the anti-corruption bureau and prosecutor's office, when the government moved to strip their independence. This time the placards carry one man's surname. The instrument is the same; what it is pointed at has narrowed from a rule to a person.

That 2025 anti-corruption protest

They came. They cussed. They won.

What a passerby would not have guessed is that no one on the square could say who had called it. The rally assembles by loudspeaker and group chat—a woman with a megaphone naming the next time to gather, a Telegram channel filling in the rest.

Kyiv-based Zinaida Averina, who helped launch last year's anti-corruption protests, says this wave has no single leader or even a single group of organizers: each local initiative, she wrote, plugs in and syncs "small pieces" into one shared wave. In the middle of a full-scale war, in roughly twenty cities, Ukrainians are holding open-ended nightly rallies that no party organized and no leader directs.

The demand, and the reason behind it

Protesters in Lviv began the open-ended rallies on 24 July. "The main demand is the appointment of Fedorov as minister of defense," said Dmytro, 24, who described the dismissal as a violation of a social contract. "This has become a systemic problem when the entire Cabinet of Ministers is dismissed without any explanation given to us."

The crowds made two demands: remove Oleksandr Syrskyi as commander-in-chief, and bring Fedorov back. The first was met within days—Syrskyi was dismissed and replaced by the more popular Mykhailo Drapatyi. The second was refused.

Iryna, 23, said she felt a violation of reciprocity between citizen and state. "Through documentation, taxes, and declarations, we are always accountable to the state, but the state is not as accountable to us as it should be," she said. She had chosen to stay in Ukraine when she could have left abroad as a refugee, she said, and wanted transparency in how personnel decisions are made.

What almost no Gen-Z on the square could say precisely was what, exactly, was being done wrong—only that something was. It is the same barometer that worked a year ago: most of the anti-corruption protesters could not have explained what the bureau adjudicates, but they knew corruption was being shielded, and they acted the only way they knew.

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Blogger-driven outrage and media bombshells

In many countries, the media struggle to get Gen Zs interested in politics. In Ukraine, bloggers fill that niche. Media activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko has spent the protest days explaining the firing to a Gen-Z audience—one stream making the case against Syrskyi drew more than 842,000 views.

What they sense, and what Sternenko names for them, is an old-army culture—"sovok," in the protest's own shorthand—of loyalty over competence and lives spent cheaply, against the newer Ukraine Fedorov stood for. Fedorov, in this telling, was pushed out for trying to change it.

The sensing rests on something real. In late June the outlet Babel published a two-month investigation into the 425th "Skelia" assault regiment, reporting at least 25 non-combat deaths of recruits in training over roughly six months—a toll that has since risen past 30 as more families came forward—with accounts of beatings and torture and official causes recorded as illness. State investigators, police, the military prosecutor and the ombudsman have opened proceedings, and the regiment's commander has been suspended. Syrskyi has called it a shameful situation and blamed individual offenders. Sternenko calls it a systemic pattern—a characterization the investigations have not established.

Why the protests went open-ended

The escalation on 24 July followed the president's decision not to nominate Fedorov. "As long as necessary, we will keep coming out until the government hears us," said Yevheniia Kupriienko, 23.

Andrii, 23, rated the government's transparency at one out of ten and said protesters want parliament to act as an independent institution rather than a rubber stamp: "decisions cannot be made by one person in the country without any commentary or communication with the people."

The man at the center of it describes something more tangled than the chant. In an interview on 29 July, Fedorov said the main reason for his removal was not the clash with Syrskyi at all. Reshaping defense procurement and tenders, he said, "stepped on the interests of many people and companies," after which pressure on his team built through the spring. He called the government's collapse a possible "screen" for his dismissal, and said he never fought for the post and would have gone quietly had someone simply explained why.

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Even the adulation makes him uneasy. His wife, Anastasia, called the frenzy around him a "sick cult of personality." The crowd chanted his name at a Kyiv music festival anyway, his face on the big screen. The man the movement is built around, and the person closest to him, are both declining the icon it has made of him.

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A soldier, and a philosopher, dissent

Andrii said he had come to stand up for the voices of Ukraine's soldiers. One serviceman passing by did not recognize himself in that description. "I know neither Drapatyi nor Fedorov. I can talk about my company commander or battalion commander," he said. He questioned how civilians, and young women in particular, could judge how senior officials are appointed, and said of the leadership: "They have big brains, they know what they are doing."

His doubt is not only his. It is the worry named this week by the philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, president of PEN Ukraine: that the tech dream the protesters chant for is real but incomplete, and that there is no alternative to massive military mobilization. "Without technology we won't win the war, but with technology alone we won't win it either. We still need people," he said. A street that senses correctly that something is wrong, in his account, is a reliable alarm—not a mechanism for choosing who runs the war.

Yet other soldiers support the protests. Veteran Dmytro Koziatynskyi, one of the Kyiv protest initiators, sparked a march "for dialogue in reform" held on vul. Khreshchatyk on 31 July. He demands Zelenskyy give Fedorov a year to conduct reforms and then "make decisions based on results."

The predictable counter-narratives have arrived too: claims that the rallies are paid, which Fedorov himself has rejected. Ukraine's disinformation center has also flagged Russian attempts to exploit the moment abroad. None of it touches the crowds on Ukraine's own squares.

Is this Euromaidan?

The comparison to the Euromaidan Revolution, in which the Russian-aligned president Yanukovych fled in the winter of 2014 after three months of protests against a rejected EU Association agreement, comes up constantly, and the protesters do not agree on it. One participant argued the mechanism is the same even if the scale is not: "No matter who the president is, if he doesn't listen, that was Yanukovych's mistake."

The serviceman rejected the comparison entirely. In 2013 the choice was between the European Union and Russia, and Russia's response to that choice produced the war Ukraine is now fighting. The present situation—a fired minister—is a different matter entirely, he said.

Halyna, 88, who watched the Euromaidan Revolution from Lviv while her son was in Kyiv, said the two are not comparable in intensity. "In 2013, the Euromaidan was such that I can't even describe it to you," she said. "Well, now the protests are not like that. People are just relaxing."

She supports them anyway. People are tired of lies and tired of a war Russia forced on them, she said, and the worst of it is that young people are dying with no end in sight. She wants to live long enough to see Ukraine at peace and left alone. Whether the rallies continue, she did not know. "I think the clock is ticking."

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