Zelensky sacks Ukraine’s top army commander after days of protests

Meanwhile, Fedorov congratulated Drapatyi with his new job, describing his appointment as a “new hope in the fight of free people for freedom and justice”.

He said it was “the voice of change that could not be ignored”.

Fedorov also revealed that he had called Syrskyi to thank him for the defence of the Kyiv region and other “historic battles”.

“But we need to move even faster and write new chapters correcting all previous mistakes,” he added.

Fedorov, 35, had been appointed defence minister only in January – but has been widely praised for using data to analyse and try to improve performance on the front line.

A former minister of digital transformation, he was active from the early days of the full-scale invasion by setting up a volunteer “IT Army of Ukraine” to launch cyber-attacks against Russia.

Later, he led a successful fundraising campaign called the Army of Drones and brought in elements of “gamification” to the war, designing a system that awarded Ukrainian military units with credits for hitting Russian assets.

Syrskyi has so far not publicly commented on the latest developments.

On Monday, he wrote an op-ed for the Militarny website, saying of his relationship with Fedorov: “I perceived our relationship as a working one”.

“If I offended anyone, Mykhailo Albertovych [Fedorov], I’m sorry.”

On the protests that have been held in several Ukrainian cities, the general wrote that the issues of military contracts, procurement and mobilisation currently being aired in the press and boiled down to pithy slogans by protesters were a great deal more complicated than most people realised.

“Decisions on which people’s lives depend are not made with slogans,” he said. “Real work, not the public drama surrounding it, wins the war,” Syrskyi wrote.