Zelensky sacks Ukraine's army chief

**Oliver Conway** (0:00)
This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 4 o'clock GMT on Wednesday the 22nd of July. Ukraine's president sacks the head of the armed forces after protests call for changes in the military leadership. France becomes the first EU state to ban social media for children. And we report from the Iranian school hit by a deadly strike on the first day of the war with the US and Israel.
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Ukraine, like Russia, has changed its military leadership several times during the past four years of all-out war. But the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to have shot himself in the foot last week by getting rid of his popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. The 35-year-old reformist has been credited with revolutionising Ukraine's drone warfare and taking the fight to Russia. But he clashed with the head of the Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, and President Zelenskyi was forced to choose between them. He ended up siding with the 60-year-old Soviet train general and removed Mr Fedorov from his post. But that didn't go down well with the public.
People chanting Syrskyi out will now, after six days of protests, President Zelenskyi has been forced to give in and sack General Syrskyi, while praising his efforts in commanding the defence of Kiev earlier in the war.

**Volodymyr Zelensky** (2:00)
I am grateful to Oleksandr Syrskyi and every one of our soldiers for Ukraine's strong frontline positions.
I am grateful to Mykhailo Drapati for having precisely the same view. Today, with Oleksandr Syrskyi and the Chief of General Staff, we talked about further service formats and the correct transfer of affairs.

**Oliver Conway** (2:22)
I heard more about the changes from our diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams in Kiev.

**Paul Adams** (2:28)
President Zelenskyi has clearly bowed to popular pressure to a certain extent.
One of the key demands of the protesters who have been on the streets for the past week has been the removal of General Syrskyi. That has now happened. President Zelenskyi heaped praise on him, not least for defending the city of Kiev four years ago at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. And he has replaced him with a new, much younger commander-in-chief, Mykhailo Drapati, a man in his mid-forties, a man thought to be a good friend of the ousted defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.
Mr. Fedorov has put out a statement of his own calling the appointment of the new commander-in-chief a breath of fresh air. That will be good news for President Zelenskyi because he will be hoping that that will take the sting out of the protests. We still don't know exactly what the impact will be because we don't know what the fate of Mr. Fedorov himself is. We know that President Zelenskyi has offered him some kind of position. We don't know what exactly. And so I think supporters of Mr. Fedorov, who have been out on the streets, will want to know a bit more about that. And I'm guessing that the discussions are still going on about his future.

**Oliver Conway** (3:38)
Yeah, because everyone will want to know what these personnel changes mean for Ukraine's war effort, which has been having some success.

**Paul Adams** (3:47)
Yes. I mean, look, what we've had revealed in the past week is that there has been a breakdown in the relationship between the defence minister and the commander in chief. And that's obviously a major issue in the midst of a war. Most protesters believe that President Zelensky chose to remove the wrong person when he removed Mr Fedorov as minister of defence. And so they were demanding that he make amends for that mistake as they see it and remove someone who they see as kind of representative of the old guard and a man trained in the Soviet military system who represents old ways of fighting. As all sorts of people put it here, you can't fight a large Soviet army with a small Soviet army. That's what they thought General Syrskyi was doing.
They see Mykhailo Fedorov as representing the future, his whole interest and involvement in the promotion of drone warfare and a whole array of other technological innovations which Ukrainians see as the only way Ukraine can really turn the tide of the war. And in fact they believe that the tide has been turned and that Mr Fedorov is partially responsible for that. But I think the fact that Mr Fedorov has given his endorsement to the new commander-in-chief does mean that essentially this week-long crisis is kind of over.