Who will be in charge of drones?
Mykhailo Fedorov's team has been removed from the management of the State Special Communications Service. Formal control over the United 24 fund has been retained, but the sources of funds for the fund have been actually cut off.
Mykhailo Fedorov
The government has appointed military general Oleksandr Potii as head of the State Special Communications Service, but the distribution of resources will be in the hands of his first deputy, Rostyslav Zamlynskyi.
Oleksandr Potii
Zamlynskyi is a trusted person of the head of the OP, Andrii Yermak, who served as Deputy Minister of Defense for Finance and Internal Audit under Defense Minister Reznikov. Zamlynskyi was the one who approved and controlled the prices of all Reznikov's scandalous procurements, when even basic drinking water was bought at a higher price than market prices, and winter jackets for the army were bought through intermediary companies of the Servant of the People deputy, and in fact turned out to be autumn jackets, not winter ones.
After the scandal and requests from our Western allies, the Presidential Office dismissed Zamlynskyi from the Defense Ministry and Yermak appointed him as the Foreign Ministry's ambassador-at-large.
The purpose of the intrigue is obvious - Yermak has taken revenge on Fedorov for his attempt to take control of the Defense Ministry and is trying to completely remove Fedorov's influence politically, just as he did with Kubrakov and others.
In 2023, thanks to the personal decision of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Fedorov received significant funds from the budget and began funding several important projects to create and use Ukrainian drones. The development of drones has actually become a project of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, and it was Zelenskyi who appointed Fedorov as the project operator. The first combat drone unit of the National Guard, created under this presidential decision, destroyed more than 8,000 units of Russian occupiers' military equipment in just one year of combat service, which is a phenomenal performance, the highest among all units of the defense forces.
It should be honestly noted that this scale-up was made possible by the decision and support of President Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Shmyhal, Finance Minister Marchenko, and under the leadership of Fedorov.
Zelenskyy was pleased, and indeed, this is currently the only very successful reform in the military sector that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief has introduced during the war.
However, this reform affected only some military units and did not become systemic, did not cover the entire army, which has suffered and continues to suffer from outdated organization and lack of funds for the purchase of drones. Fedorov proposed to Zelenskyy a reform based on scaling up successful drone projects throughout the army and increasing the amount of resources allocated to drones and drone units.
To administer this, Fedorov proposed his friend, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure Oleksandr Kubrakov, who Zelenskyy trusted and who had organizational skills and interaction with Western partners, as Minister of Defense. As part of this plan, the Unmanned Systems Forces were created, and Fedorov proposed Vadym Sukharevskyi to the president to lead them. Zelenskyy appointed Sukharevskyi after a personal interview.
But as soon as Fedorov announced this plan, Yermak immediately became his mortal enemy. Yermak is trying to control the entire foreign policy, and for this he needs to have his own person in the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry. Yermak is trying to control only information and financial flows through his people, and whether these people know anything about the war or drones is not important.
Kubrakov was the first person whom Yermak politically destroyed. Fedorov is harder to remove, so Yermak began an operation to limit his influence and actually took away the allocation of funds for drones.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, did a lot to prevent Sukharevskyi from working independently, suffice it to say that Syrskyi did not even approve the Chief of Staff of the SSU for 8 months. Obviously, he did this not just for his own reasons, but largely because of Yermak's influence.
I don't mean to say that Fedorov's work was flawless, that his personnel decisions were always competent, that drone procurement was always clean, that there were no complaints about prices, intermediaries, or scandals. There were and are objective grounds for criticizing Fedorov, and we need to be honest about it. It's just that if you evaluate the results and look at the balance sheet - how much was invested and how much was destroyed, it's obvious that the enemy's losses as a result of this project are not even a factor of 5-6 times higher than our costs of destroying this equipment and personnel.
All things are known by comparison, and now that current high-ranking officials and friends of Yermak, Arakhamia, Koliubiaev, Mindich are lobbyists for certain manufacturing companies, and Reznikov's former deputy is in charge of money, the complaints are unlikely to be less.
Now, Andrii Yermak and his team have personally assumed full responsibility for the development of drones, i.e. for the order of technological changes in the army, for determining funding priorities, for the opportunity to change the currently unsuccessful course of the war. We will see very soon whether they will be able to administer the drone industry and will keep you informed.
Because, as President Zelenskyy said in the Resilience Plan:
"We should not be afraid to talk about difficult things and problems in the army. Effective solutions are possible only if we have an honest conversation... Problems need to be overcome, not concealed. The causes must be found out and eliminated."
