Fedorov is Zelenskyy's best decision yet — military expert

Valentyn Badrak, military expert and director of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, expressed this opinion on Espreso TV.

"We need to divide Fedorov's appointment into two parts. The first part is Fedorov's potential capabilities. And the second part is what the president actually wants to achieve with this appointment. I'll start with the second: in reality, the appointment is part of President Zelenskyy's media stories. And, let's say, authoritative figures like Vadym Sukhorukov, or Palysa, who ended up in the presidential office, even Madyar, who became commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces - this is also part of the president's media narrative. Unfortunately, where people don't want to participate in the president's media stories, they disappear from view, like Zaluzhnyi, like Maliuk, and so on. But now directly about Fedorov. Fedorov, in my subjective opinion, is President Zelenskyy's best decision at this moment. And I'll say frankly here, I spoke little about this because it's wartime and I didn't want to talk about it during this large-scale, intensive, genocidal war by the Kremlin. But Ministers Reznikov and Umerov - they were simply terrible for Ukraine. It's just, unfortunately, such complex negative stories that I simply don't want to detail them; it would take two hours to talk about the negatives they brought to Ukrainian history. Then Shmyhal, seemingly a systematic person, but in August 2025 he made, in my view, extremely negative statements about mobilization, saying that everything is going normally, everything is wonderful, we're fulfilling our plans," he said.

Valentyn Badrak noted that he perceived this very negatively: "And I understood that Shmyhal is not the person capable of heading the Defense Ministry, although, to his credit, he took a positive and serious approach to the Defense City project status and to the defense industry. That's all fine, I can't say anything negative about that."

"And now Mykhailo Fedorov - a young person, untainted, a person who genuinely wants major changes. A person whose team - and I know this, I was a host on the Apostrof TV channel and I had his deputies and his people there, and they all, even if they didn't fully or deeply understand something, they adapted very quickly, and I say that this is a very promising team. The main thing is that they let him work, and the main thing is that he actually creates a broad team, because I agree here with Tetyana Mykolaienko, whose article I consider to be key on this topic on Censor.net. And I believe that much will depend on Petrov himself. But the perspective is enormous. An enormous perspective connected with continuing Defense Technopro development, continuing military-technical cooperation. Our problems with missile programs stem from the slowdown in military-technical cooperation, from the inability to convince partners to provide us with certain technologies. And here, it seems to me, he has enormous potential, but everything depends on many factors. His team, how much the president will use him as a media story, how the overall situation will develop, including the geopolitical situation," the military expert noted.