Ukraine’s ousted Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections in a bombshell address on Tuesday, arguing the nation faced a crisis of governance, in the biggest internal challenge to President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia’s invasion.
Fedorov’s call, delivered in a video address posted on YouTube, is the first such demand by a major Ukrainian political figure since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections during wartime.
“Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia,” Fedorov said. “We must find a legal, safe and realistic mechanism that will allow Ukraine to renew its full democratic process even in the conditions of a long war.”
The 35-year-old Fedorov was a longtime ally of Zelensky until his unexpected firing from the Defense Ministry in July, just six months after he had been appointed, vowing sweeping reforms.
Fedorov was the guy in the Ministry of Digital Transformation who back in February 2022 tweeted at Elon asking for Starlink which got them that shortly afterwards back in the time when it was very good publicity to back Ukraine. In more recent times he was in charge of trying to convince Elon to restrict Russia’s use of Starlink and to allow Ukraine to use Starlink in Russia. So they’ve been having a lot of texting and video calls to that end which evidently worked.
With Fedorov having gotten what he wanted out of those talks, being an acquaintance of him and knowing that Elon sometimes supports foreign politicians, I guess he figures it doesn’t hurt to puff Elon up with this sort of message made a day or two back in case Elon helps support his bid for the leadership:
For background Fedorov has become very popular in Ukraine for his modernization efforts to crack down on corruption in military procurement and focus on drone warfare. Zelensky recently fired Fedorov from his new position of Defense Minister which was a very controversial move that no doubt worsened their relations with each other.
Restricting Russian starlink wasnt ever really a thing that SpaceX needed convincing of, it was Ukraine that needed to decide it wanted it, as it required a whitelist.
They hadn’t been getting buy in from their soldiers because a lot of dishes were donated and the soldiers were worried they’d lose their dish if they registered it.
Once Russia started putting them on drones that were harder to destroy because of it, push came to shove and a whitelist was authorized and SpaceX actioned it right away.