Ukraine’s new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on Tuesday the priorities for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in coming months will be big increases in drone-operating combat units and attack weapons for them with the goal of inflicting at least 50,000 irrecoverable casualties, i.e., KIA (killed in action), on Kremlin forces every month those Russian solders remain on Ukrainian territory.
Fedorov, an IT entrepreneur who formerly served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, officially took over as Minister of Defense following election to the job by Ukraine’s legislature on Jan. 14. His remarks to Kyiv reporters were his first public statement to the media about his plans for the ministry.
Fedorov said his main focus would be systemic reform, modernization and “comprehensive changes” within the Defense Ministry with the objective of making the AFU more lethal and more capable of sustaining a long, attrition war against Russia.
Ukraine’s military already is inflicting more casualties on Russian forces than the Kremlin can replace, around 35,000 soldiers a month, he said.
But to force Russia to the negotiating table or to quit its war in Ukraine and bring the Russian forces home, that figure should rise to 50,000 Russian soldiers killed – not including wounded – every month, Fedorov said. In comments reported by the news platform Babel.ua, Fedorov said:
“President Volodymyr Zelensky has set a clear task – to build a system that is capable of stopping the enemy in the sky, [halting its] advance on the ground, strengthening asymmetric and cyber strikes against the enemy and its economy. To make the price of war for Russia such that it will not be able to bear it, and thereby force peace by force.”
Top AFU officers in early January reported their forces in December, primarily using drones, artillery, mortars and land mines had almost certainly inflicted 35,000 casualties on mostly attacking Russian forces, and claimed that for the first time in the war Russian losses had exceeded monthly recruitment figures claimed by Kyiv to be around 33,000 personnel a month.
Kremlin spokesmen and Russian state-controlled media have rubbished the Ukrainian claims and asserted, without evidence, that recruiting targets are being met and exceeded.
On the Ukrainian battlefield, however, Russian attacks during the Kremlin’s winter offensive have repeatedly stalled because of heavy losses, and Ukrainian combat units have reported entire sectors of the front having gone quiet for days, possibly because of insufficient numbers of Russian troops available to make new attacks.
Fedorov said the keys to increasing Russian combat losses would be deepened digitization of AFU field operations, centralization and standardization of tactically-critical First Person View (FPV) drones used by AFU pilots to hit Russian targets, and expanded production of FPV and bomber drones.
In comments to reporters he repeated a slogan that he said, during parliament confirmation hearings, encapsulated his focus for Ukraine’s military: “More technology — fewer casualties.”
Fedorov called Ukraine’s current military organizational structure “outdated for modern needs” and said that digitization and technological innovation would replace it.
The Defense Ministry will undergo a “deep audit” to reduce bureaucracy and improve support to service members and especially frontline units, he said.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry is “already closely cooperating” on reform and future planning with the US-headquartered Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS )and Rand consulting companies, and the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Fedorov said.
Fedorov said other projects slated for Ukraine’s forces in coming months and years include development of a direct competing aircraft made wholly of Ukrainian components similar to (but with a longer range than) China’s ubiquitous MAVIC mini quad-prop, centralized tracking of munitions and aircraft counts and supply of replacements to strike units, full digital integration of tactical reconnaissance and attack drones with conventional artillery units, and fielding of killer drone teams trained and equipped to hunt down and destroy Russian drone operators.
Fedorov, a native of Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, was an entrepreneur and businessman focused on IT and digital projects prior to joining government. In 2019 at the age of 28 he became the youngest cabinet minister in the Ukraine’s history.
Prior to the full-scale Russian invasion, Fedorov oversaw a massive overhaul of most Ukrainian state administrative work and public services from legacy-era paper-based record-keeping to digital-based operations that made him a household name.
In one of the most popular initiatives of modern Ukrainian government, Fedorov’s ministry overhauled state record-keeping and administrative processes and placed almost all routine procedures like registering a pet or paying a utility bill or a parking fine online.
The move digitizing more than 90% of state bureaucratic processes ended almost overnight decades of Soviet and Russian Imperial service traditions forcing citizens to collect sometimes dozens of pieces of paper from local officials, any one of whom might well demand a bribe, and then stand in a queue for hours for a single government approval.
Following Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Fedorov led civil-society initiatives searching out funding and expertise for development and massed production of drones for Ukrainian forces.
The drone initiative, originally intended to supplement conventional arms support to the AFU, became a critical component of national defense in late 2023 after the Republican-led US House of Representatives, at then-former-President Donald Trump’s direction, cut Ukraine off from arms deliveries, leaving the AFU catastrophically short of artillery ammunition.
Ukrainian drone manufacturing, by and large driven by non-government initiatives like Fedorov’s Army of Drones project, and donations filled much of the gap.
As the AFU expanded the quantity and lethality of its drone units, Fedorov introduced a points system by which drone operators could score points for destruction of various types of Russian equipment, or casualties inflicted on Russian personnel, through which the highest-scoring drone teams would receive the largest number of Army of Drones-manufactured lethal attack UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).
Kremlin officials have criticized the initiative as Ukraine state-sanctioned murder of Russian soldiers. In the AFU the Fedorov-developed “kill point” system has become the baseline metric used across the force to judge a drone unit’s combat effectiveness.
Fedorov was appointed Minister of Digital Transformation on Aug. 29, 2019, at the age of 28. Currently aged 35, he is a solid generation younger than a typical NATO nation’s Defense Minister, on average aged 55-56 years old, per Kyiv Post estimate.
Of the major NATO states in Europe, including Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, the average defense minister age is 65 years old. The 67th birthday of Fedorov’s Kremlin direct adversary, Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, will take place on March 17.