Public opinion on the July personnel decisions in Ukraine: the Fedorov and Drapatyi cases

July 2026 brought a week of major reshuffles to Ukraine's defence hierarchy. On 15–16 July President Zelenskyi announced the dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov as minister of defence – the long-serving head of the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the “father of the Diia app”, a figure whom public discourse firmly associates with the digitalisation of the state and the “drone” modernisation of the army. Then on 21–22 July, in an evening address, the president replaced the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, with Mykhailo Drapatyi – a young general with a purely combat biography: the defence of Mariupol in 2014, the breakout from the Ilovaisk encirclement, continuous war from its very beginning. Two high-profile personnel decisions in a single week, both in a domain where lives are at stake, and both taken by one hand.

It was this density of events that shaped the design of the study. Each respondent was asked about only one of the two replacements (the news about Drapatyi reached us in the middle of the survey on Fedorov's dismissal): the Fedorov block covered 217 interviews, the Drapatyi block 215. This, we stress, is not “the same people on both events” but two random subsamples of one general population – two random cross-sections of the same society taken at almost the same time (the questions about Fedorov were asked on 21 and 22 July, those about Drapatyi on 23, 24 and 25 July). Each respondent could explain their attitude in their own words, and not only through fixed answer options.

Read about the findings of the study at the link:

https://sociotest.solutions/mat/2_fed_dra/