Le président américain compte appeler Mark Carney vendredi à ce sujet.

Ukraine's Defense Procurement Agency contracted for about $8 billion worth of unmanned aerial vehicles in the first half of 2026. It is double the figure for the same period last year, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said. 

Purchases go partly through the state weapons marketplace, DOT-Chain Defense, where combat units select the systems they need with budget funds, and the agency handles contracts, payments, and logistics, bringing the average delivery time for in-stock items down to 9 days.

Ukraine received 1,028 ground robots and over $790 million in equipment through the same family of systems by mid-2026. The $8 billion in drones is the aerial side of the same overhaul, and it doubled year-on-year.

Battlefield data decides what gets bought

In March, the Defense Ministry introduced a procurement approach that bases drone demand on battlefield data rather than human judgment, which it says minimizes subjectivity and reduces the risk of corruption.

The algorithm is specific. Combat data from Ukraine's digital systems — eBaly, DOT-Chain, Brave1 Market, DELTA, and Mission Control — generates a ranking of unmanned systems by real performance. The General Staff, on units' requests, uses that ranking to set the list of systems to buy, defining quantities and types directly. The agency then contracts what the list names.

The point of the loop is that the state buys only drones that work, hit targets, and have proven themselves at the front, per the Defense Ministry.

It is the same eBaly performance system that has delivered more than 181,000 drones, robots, and other items to frontline units in 2026, with units ordering equipment based on points earned for confirmed battlefield results. Battlefield data, not procurement lobbying, determines market allocation.

Competitive tenders cut costs, and one contract saved 16%

For part of the drone fleet, the agency runs closed competitive tenders based on tactical-technical specifications from the General Staff, which widens the field of participants.

That approach has a track record. The same competitive method applied to long-range 155mm ammunition achieved savings of over 16%. It is the reform-and-savings logic that outgoing Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov made central to his tenure.

Also, the Defense Ministry, together with the Cabinet and the procurement agency, introduced a mechanism to adjust contract prices for fiber-optic drones, which kept contracting and the supply of that type running despite a sharp global rise in optical fiber prices. Fiber-optic drones cannot be jammed because they trail a physical cable, making them one of the most sought-after systems on the front.

Les deux joueurs s'affronteront dimanche lors de la finale de la Coupe du monde.

En Ukraine, le remaniement ministériel effectué jeudi par le président Zelensky ne passe pas.

The president’s Orwellian speech on Thursday was just the latest instance of his denialism. It is up to us to resist

On Thursday night, Donald Trump did it again, trashing another American tradition with his primetime address from the White House’s East Room about election integrity. Other presidents have used such speeches in times of national emergency, to announce major new policies designed to improve Americans’ lives or to honor American traditions.

Not Trump.

In five days, Ukraine dismissed its prime minister, installed a new Cabinet, and removed the defense minister who built its drone war—and for the first time since last summer, thousands of Ukrainians filled the streets of 17 cities against a wartime decision of their own president. The prime minister nobody protested for is gone quietly. Thousands demanded the reformer stay. He is gone anyway.

What the week decided is who now governs Ukraine, and the question reaches past Kyiv into EU accession talks and the shape of postwar politics. Three forces claim the ground: the constitutional institutions on paper, the Office of the President in practice, and a society that has now twice in 12 months forced its leader to answer to the street.

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Five days, one government

Late on 11 July, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signaled coming personnel changes on the diplomatic front. The next day, he set out the scope.

“Ukraine is changing its political strategy,” he wrote on Telegram, assigning each foreign-policy priority to “a specific person,” announcing that the Cabinet would be renewed, and thanking Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko for her work while offering her “a new significant direction in relations with a key partner”—wording widely read as the Washington ambassadorship.

On 14 July, Parliament voted 258 to accept Svyrydenko’s resignation, which under the Constitution brought down her entire Cabinet with her.

On 15 July, it emerged that Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov—the 35-year-old who built Ukraine’s drone ecosystem, and whose first months in the ministry produced an audit exposing $7.2 billion in defense overspending—would not be renominated.

In a parting post, he named three unfinished reforms: completing the ministry’s NATO-standard reorganization, moving all procurement to open tenders, and building a culture of accountability for decisions taken.

In the same accounting, he pointedly noted that Ukraine had tested a ballistic missile developed within the ministry’s area of responsibility on 14 July—the very day the government fell—with its accuracy maximized and its cost cut by 30%. “Symbolically,” he called the timing.

Serhii Sternenko, whose foundation delivered over 118,000 FPV drones to the army, resigned as a ministry adviser the same day, calling the state “further from victory.” By evening, the first rallies formed in Lviv.

On 16 July, Parliament appointed Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi as prime minister with 289 votes, then approved his Cabinet as a package with 264 votes, leaving open the two seats the president alone nominates: defense and foreign affairs.

Much of the government stayed: Denys Shmyhal kept the energy portfolio as first deputy prime minister, and several deputy ministers moved up a chair.

Outside, “cardboard protests” spread to Kyiv and at least 16 other cities. Deputy Air Force commander Pavlo Yelizarov resigned in protest, warning that the firing and the blocking of Fedorov’s reforms “will cause numerous casualties and destruction of Ukraine.”

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That evening, Zelenskyy did two things at once. He told the crowds they were right to protest even in wartime—then pressed ahead anyway, passing over both Fedorov and Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, his own reported first choice for defense, to name special-operations commander Yevhenii Khmara acting defense minister.

Klymenko did not stay at Interior either: the president moved him to run the National Security and Defense Council, and National Police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi took over Interior.

By 17 July, the demonstrations had entered a second day, and Ukraine had a defense minister whom Parliament had not confirmed.

The explanation the president gave

This time, Zelenskyy offered reasons. The reshuffle would refocus the government on energy resilience before another winter of Russian strikes and on EU accession—a logic under which Koretskyi, who ran Naftogaz through Russia’s campaign against the grid, is a defensible pick.

On Fedorov, the president pointed to a broken relationship between the Defense Ministry and the military command, said he could not choose between the minister and Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, and refused to assign the blame to either side alone.

“Together we win, and together we bear responsibility for things that cause confusion and public resonance,” he said at a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, adding that he still wanted Fedorov on the team.

The stated reasons leave the central question standing. In a documented conflict between a reforming minister and his commander-in-chief—a conflict Fedorov himself has now described in detail—the president resolved it by removing the minister mid-reform, not the commander. Nothing in the public account says why that was the choice.

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Fedorov breaks his silence: Ukraine’s army chief Syrskyi gave him an ultimatum—then blocked his reforms

“It was about personal loyalty”

Oleksiy Haran, professor of comparative politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and research director at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, told Euromaidan Press the search for a policy rationale starts from the wrong end.

The problem is not this reshuffle, he argued, but where decisions get made: in the Office of the President, on Bankova Street—under Zelenskyy and, before his dismissal, under his chief of staff Andriy Yermak. “Definitely, it was about personal loyalty,” Haran said.

In his reading, this is a system Zelenskyy built and cannot imagine running any other way: the president “is not democratic in essence” and believes himself a “messianic leader”—a self-conception dented by early wartime failures, then restored by success.

Haran also punctured the “wholesale purge” framing that dominated the week’s commentary. Much of the Cabinet simply stayed or shuffled sideways. “They are just moving around,” he said. Zelenskyy speaks of a new political approach, Haran noted—“but what’s that approach about? I don’t see it.”

One appointment inside that Cabinet showed the deeper pattern. The Digital Transformation Ministry—the body that built the e-governance and digitized document app Diia and reorganized the state around it—appointed Oksana Ferchuk, the first person to lead it who was not part of Fedorov’s founding team.

As Ukrainska Pravda noted, the ministry’s reach had leaned less on its projects than on Fedorov’s political weight and his direct line to the president—a reach Fedorov himself credited to Zelenskyy’s backing.

There is a deeper reading: that inner-circle rule is the inheritance of Soviet institutional distrust and the lawless 1990s, when only personal networks could be relied on. Haran is skeptical of the tidy version.

Many Soviet citizens believed the system’s promises of justice, he noted, and Ukrainians’ distrust of state institutions is a long-run trend that predates Zelenskyy rather than a trait he personally embodies. What the war changed, he added, is that trust rose toward the army, the security services, and the anti-corruption bodies.

The other trust system

That is the half of the story that the protests made visible. Whatever its roots, personalized power is only one of Ukraine’s two working systems of trust—and this week they collided in the open.

Polling shows how differently the two are priced. In the latest national survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, conducted in May, Fedorov’s trust rating climbed to 50% from 38% in January, and his trust-minus-distrust balance now edges slightly ahead of the president’s own, KIIS polling shows.

The figures Ukrainians trust most are military commanders and volunteers; nearly every career politician on the list is distrusted by more people than trust them. Svyrydenko, the dismissed prime minister, was trusted by 27%—and her removal drew not a single placard.

Fedorov’s drew thousands. In Lviv, one cardboard sign read: “The audit showed 300 billion in theft. They removed the auditor, not the thieves.” The protesters were not demanding elections or the president’s resignation. They were defending one official on one record—open procurement, a drone industry, an audit—against a decision made without them.

Olena Shandra, 18, stood among them at a downtown Kyiv demonstration on 17 July and told Euromaidan Press what the week looked like from the square. She read it as a contest between “Soviet Ukraine and the new one”—and, for now, the Soviet one winning through Fedorov’s removal, the minister she saw as the one person in government “really wanting to introduce something new.” She had marched last July, too, against the law targeting the anti-corruption agencies.

Yet she drew a hard line at where the anger should stop: the president “has overstayed,” she said, but toppling him now would be “senseless and bad for Ukraine, because it plays into the hands of our main enemy—the one outside, waiting for exactly that moment.”

It is the same civic reflex that, last July, combined with a freeze on EU aid, forced Zelenskyy to reverse a law stripping the anti-corruption agencies of their independence within days.

The president has acknowledged the crowds’ right to stand there. He has not, so far, moved for them. Ukraine ends the week with a prime minister chosen for the winter, an acting defense minister awaiting a confirmation vote, a reform program running without its architects—and, on the squares of 17 cities, a piece of cardboard that reads “Results take time.”

À 39 ans, le capitaine de l'Albiceleste montre qu'il conserve un niveau de jeu exceptionnel.

« Aujourd’hui, résister ne signifie pas prendre les armes, mais refuser de confondre patience et soumission. »

World No 2 was in full flow off the tee but off colour on the greens and knows he needs to make a charge on moving day

One of the sweetest sounds in sport is the elongated swoosh that comes as Rory McIlroy’s driver connects with his ball. Really, it is a beautiful thing. You imagine the impact will be a violent clank. Instead it is more like a yogi softly exhaling having found nirvana.

But as McIlroy stepped on the 414-yard par-four 9th on Friday, he was still searching for inner peace. He was plus one for the tournament. The leaderboard was turning a sea of red. And he had substantial ground to make up.