JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Juana Summers.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
I'm Mary Louise Kelly. And it is with a touch of pride that I point out NPR is one of the only American news organizations to have kept correspondence on the ground in both Ukraine and in Russia for the four years and counting that those two countries have been locked in all-out war, which is helpful as we report on this next story about a battle that has been playing out within Ukraine - a showdown between a 30-something tech wizard and a 60-something battle-hardened general. That showdown is raising questions about the direction of the war. NPR correspondents Charles Maynes in Moscow and Greg Myre in Kyiv join me to talk it through on our national security podcast Sources & Methods.
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KELLY: What is the latest?
GREG MYRE: Yeah. So the two main figures leading the war for Ukraine have both been dismissed in the past week - the defense minister, the young, 30-something tech whiz, and then the head of the army, a 60-year-old Soviet-trained, hard-nosed, very old-school-type general. They could not get along to the point of not being able to communicate. And so President Zelenskyy felt he had to step in. And he got rid of the young guy, Mykhailo Fedorov, the tech whiz, as defense minister.
KELLY: Who you have been covering for a while now, right?
MYRE: Yeah. I mean, I first really came across him three years ago at a sort of drone exhibition here in Kyiv. And probably more than any other individual, he has represented the rise of drones here. He just told people to start building drones, and they did it in their garage, and he cut through the red tape and cut this army military procurement process way down. And now we've seen this absolute revolution in the way that Ukraine is using drones. Many people are involved, but he's really been the face of it, and he was dismissed last week. That led to protests in the streets...
KELLY: Right.
MYRE: ...Saying he should be kept in that position.
KELLY: OK. So that's one of the players. He was dismissed last week. And then speak for a moment to this old guard general, who was his rival, who seemed for - what? - about five minutes there to have been prevailing in that rivalry. But the...
MYRE: Yeah.
KELLY: ...Latest twist is now he's out too?
MYRE: Yeah. That's right, Mary Louise. He's General Oleksandr Syrskyi, 60 years old. When he joined the military four decades ago, it was as part of the Soviet Union and learning this very rigid doctrinal style of fighting, a real heavy emphasis on ground troops and artillery and never retreat, you hold your ground. And Syrskyi, as I said, you know, as you noted, seemed to prevail in this showdown last week when Zelenskyy fired the younger Fedorov. But the protests started taking place in the street daily.
And then late Tuesday night, Zelenskyy put out a video on social media and said he was dismissing Syrskyi as well. So these two major figures, the two people you were kind of watching as they ran the war in Ukraine, are now both out of a job.
KELLY: So to sum up, we're talking about two different posts, the defense minister and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Both these guys got sacked by Zelenskyy within the last week. Who is running Ukraine's war now?
MYRE: Yeah. They've picked a new army chief. Zelenskyy named him Tuesday night. He's Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi, and he's a well-known figure here as well. He's only 43, and he's had a very prominent role. He really shot to fame back in 2014 when Russia first invaded. He was just a major then. And he led a charge in an armored vehicle against some blockades that had been set up in southeast Ukraine. There's a sort of amazing video of him just charging through this tire blockade in an armored vehicle going seemingly 40 or 50 miles an hour, just blasting through it and sending tires in all directions. And so he kind of became a folk hero way back then.
KELLY: Charles, how has Moscow responded to this whole - I was calling it a soap opera - certainly, a drama in Ukraine?
CHARLES MAYNES: Yeah. You know, the official reaction here is that it doesn't matter much who's the defense minister in Ukraine, who's the chief of armed forces, because they insist - at least in the Kremlin - the Russian forces are on the march, that Ukraine's success of late is overblown. The problem seems to be that neither is quite true. Certainly, if you look at, for example, these pro-war bloggers - these so-called Z-bloggers - you know, they celebrated the firing of Fedorov, acknowledging that he'd really revamped the Ukrainian drone program.
KELLY: So some celebration from Russia of the ousting of Fedorov, the young tech wizard. I can imagine if I were sitting in the Kremlin, I might also try to explain this as weakness. You know, Ukraine is failing. Ukraine isn't working, so that's why they're firing all the guys who were running the war there.
MAYNES: Absolutely. This absolutely plays to a narrative that the Kremlin has said from the beginning, that Ukraine is an unserious, a semi-failed state. It's corrupt. It's incompetent. And here you have - I mean, for example, the foreign ministry spokesperson said, you know, let me get this straight, OK, Ukraine is supposedly having all this military success on the battlefield, and yet they've just fired their top two military officials, it makes no sense.
The problem is that Western intelligence at least says that, you know, Russia's gains are minimal at best. They're often coming with heavy losses. And so in some ways, really, this has been a game changer in the battlefield, and the question's what happens going forward?
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KELLY: That is Charles Maynes in Moscow and Greg Myre in Kyiv, speaking with me on NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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