President Volodymyr Zelenskyy overhauled Ukraine's military and defense leadership on July 21, resolving the political crisis touched off by his July 16 sacking of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and days of street protests. In a late-night address he dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi — the general who led the 2022 defense of Kyiv and the 2024 Kursk incursion — and appointed Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, 43, a commander of the joint forces group seen as a Fedorov ally, to run the armed forces, tasking him not with battlefield command but with reorganising the corps structure, speeding weapon and drone deliveries, strengthening air defense, and clarifying an unpopular mobilisation drive. Ukraine has no confirmed defence minister. Maj. Gen. Yevhen Khmara, the former special-operations commander whom the Guardian reported as the new minister, holds the post only in an acting capacity: the Verkhovna Rada approved a new government on July 16 without appointing either a defence or a foreign minister, and Cabinet orders No. 722 and No. 723 of July 17 made Khmara deputy minister and then acting minister, with Interfax-Ukraine reporting he took charge on July 20. No nomination has been submitted to parliament. MP Fedir Venislavskyi told NV on July 23 that Khmara cannot simply be confirmed, because the law requires a civilian minister rather than a serving officer; the two routes open are for Khmara to enter the reserve or for parliament to amend the law to allow a serving officer to hold the post in wartime. Fedorov, rather than being reinstated, was offered a senior government role unifying Ukraine's technology sector. The reshuffle marked the largest wartime shake-up of Ukraine's top brass and the resolution of its biggest domestic political crisis since 2022, though it was not immediately clear the moves would fully quiet the protests. The overhaul continued the next day: on July 22 Zelenskyy appointed General Staff deputy chief Maj. Gen. Ihor Skybyuk — commander of the Airborne Assault Forces from February 2024 to June 2025 — as chief of the General Staff, replacing Maj. Gen. Andriy Hnatov. Six days on, the Council on Foreign Relations reported that the episode is not closed: Zelenskyy has offered Fedorov escalating alternatives — most recently deputy prime minister for military innovation together with a senior national-security advisory role — and Fedorov has publicly refused anything other than the defence ministry, while Ukraine still has only an acting defence minister and Drapatyi has yet to establish his own authority. CFR reads the protests as having forced a correction rather than as having been settled, and notes there could be further changes; this entry's original claim that the reshuffle ended the crisis is corrected accordingly. The protests were about Fedorov's dismissal and his procurement-reform agenda, not about anti-corruption legislation — the NABU and SAPO independence fight was a separate episode in 2025. Drapatyi took charge of a manpower problem before he took charge of a front. His first act as Commander-in-Chief was to order an assessment of how combat units are staffed and how personnel are distributed across the force, and the Kyiv Independent's account of what he inherited explains why: over the past year standard mechanised manoeuvre brigades were receiving a few dozen new recruits a month while assault units such as the 425th Skelia Regiment — which often operated outside its corps and answered directly to Syrskyi — frequently received more than a thousand. The corps reform announced in February 2025 remains half-finished, with some corps built around strong formations working well and most others short of the assault, artillery and drone units a corps needs, so responsibility for failures still stops at brigade level. Moscow's reaction was dismissive: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on July 22 that he did not "think that this would lead to any changes on the front lines", adding that Russian forces were advancing along the entire front — a claim the ISW's own assessments contradicted at the time, having recorded four consecutive days on which neither side made a confirmed advance anywhere. Ukrainian analysts read the appointment as a partial fix rather than a resolution. Volodymyr Fesenko of the Penta think tank said it "only partially removes political tensions. The Fedorov problem remains, although it may have become smaller, less acute"; Fedorov, offered a post as presidential adviser for technological reform in the military, declined it and publicly congratulated Drapatyi. Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, a former deputy head of the General Staff, said the appointment leaves untouched the structural contradiction between the General Staff and the Defence Ministry that Ukraine inherited from the Soviet system, and that it "will remain [in Ukraine] until we finish the reforms according to NATO standards".