Ihor Petrenko, Doctor of Political Sciences, expert of the United Ukraine Analytical Center
Why the week of the loudest personnel decisions did not shake the public’s rating of those in power — and why this is not a blank check
July 2026 handed Ukrainian sociology a rare natural experiment. Within seven days the president made two high-profile decisions in one and the same domain: on July 15–16 he dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, and on July 21–22 he replaced Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi with Mykhailo Drapatyi. Society passed opposite verdicts on them: a relative majority disapproved of the first decision, while it supported the second. And yet the rating of those in power did not budge.
It is precisely this immobility, rather than the verdicts themselves, that is the central political fact of July.
Two Verdicts in One Week
The data come from the first wave of the omnibus survey “Reliably About Ukrainians,” which the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine conducted on July 21–25 using telephone interviews. The study’s design turned out this way because of the density of events: the news about Drapatyi caught the fieldwork stage midway, so each respondent answered about only one of the two replacements. The Fedorov block comprised 217 interviews, the Drapatyi block 215. These are not the same people speaking about two events, but two random cross-sections of the same society, taken almost simultaneously.
Fedorov’s dismissal was assessed negatively (that is, respondents were against it) by 57%; neutrally or indifferently by 25%; 12% could not answer; and 6% approved. The replacement of Syrskyi with Drapatyi was approved by 54%; 33% were neutral; 6% could not answer; and 7% disapproved. The distributions are almost mirror images: a majority against the president’s decision, and a majority for the president’s decision, made by the same hand six days later.
The backdrop against which these verdicts were passed is harsh. Forty-five percent call the living conditions of most of the population “generally poor,” and only 6% “good.” The economic situation is rated on average at 4.1 out of 10. Nearly half — 46% — characterize their own wartime losses as substantial or maximal. The performance of those in power receives 4.2 out of 10, with 39% giving it a 0–3 and only 22% a 7–10.
The First Paradox: The Verdict and the Attitude Live in Different Registers
The key observation lies not in the distributions themselves, but in what does not correlate with them.
In the Fedorov case, those who opposed the dismissal rate those in power at 4.4 on average — no lower than those who supported it (4.5). In the Drapatyi case, those who approve give the authorities 4.2. In both instances the differences between the camps fall within the margin of error, which for the half-samples reaches 7%. Disagreement with a specific decision does not translate into a negative attitude toward those who made it; support for a decision does not translate into loyalty.
Political science has an old and precise framework for this — the distinction between diffuse and specific support proposed by David Easton. Specific support is a reaction to particular actions and particular outcomes; it is mobile by definition and is meant to move week by week. Diffuse support is addressed not to decisions but to the very construction of authority and its right to make decisions; it changes slowly and for different reasons. The July data show these two levels in pure form: specific support made a full turn over the course of a week, while diffuse support stayed in place.
The practical consequence of this is non-obvious and important: the street protest against Fedorov’s dismissal was not an anti-government protest. This is also visible in the structure of the responses. The reasoning of those opposed rests not on political symbols but on a concrete list — digitalization, drones, FPV, Starlink, “Diia,” “Army+,” “Reserve+.” People were defending not a figure and not a camp, but a result they are able to verify through their own experience.
A Standard, Not Loyalty
A second circumstance explains why the opposite verdicts do not contradict each other. In both cases respondents applied one and the same criterion.
Fedorov was defended as a bearer of the modern way of fighting: technology instead of “meat,” results instead of process. Drapatyi was welcomed for the very same thing — a “new generation,” an “independent school as opposed to the Soviet one,” a combat biography going back to 2014, the reputation of a commander who counts his soldiers’ lives. Syrskyi was rejected by the mirror-image criterion. In other words, through two opposite verdicts society affirmed a single axis of values: those who run the war should be people of this century, who count lives and are rooted in the country they are defending. In the case of the commander-in-chief, an ethnic frame was added to this — for some respondents Syrskyi’s origin functioned as a disqualifier in its own right, whereas in the Fedorov case there was no such note at all.
This is the behavior not of an electorate waiting to see who will be offered to it, but of a client that has already drawn up the technical specifications.
The third circumstance is who exactly delivers the verdicts. It is the informed segment that gives a distinct assessment: among those who opposed Fedorov’s dismissal, 73 out of 118 know the details of the event, and only one had not heard of it; among the 114 approving responses in the Drapatyi case, 83 belong to people familiar with the general’s biography and the history of the “Skela” (“Rock”) regiment. The neutral pole consists mainly of those who “heard about it but did not dig in.” Overall, 45% of the sample know the details of the July events, and another 41% have heard of them. The source of these assessments, moreover, is not the media narrative but verifiable experience: an app on a phone screen, drones intercepted in the sky over a frontline region, the accounts of sons and husbands from the front, flags in a village cemetery. This is an environment in which a statement is checked against one’s own experience — and where the two diverge, experience wins.
Where the Historically High Rating Comes From
A rating of 4.2 out of 10 looks mediocre — until you compare it with the prewar norm. The director of the Institute of Sociology, Yevhen Holovakha, draws attention to precisely this: before the war, Ukraine’s authorities scored higher only immediately after elections, whereas several years into a term of governance 4.2 would have been an anomalously high figure. He also cites a second pair of numbers: the country’s economy is now rated at 4.1, compared with 2.4 before the war, despite the loss of roughly a third of GDP.
This resilience has three different sources, and they should not be conflated.
The first source, and the most obvious one for Ukrainian politics, is the personal one. Ukrainian politics is personified historically, and wartime politics all the more so: in mass consciousness “the authorities” is read to a large extent as the president. And the presidential function in wartime has its own substance, separate from domestic governance: negotiations with partners, sustaining Western support, publicly upholding the country’s position. This is a different sphere of responsibility than personnel appointments in defense — and it is assessed separately. A respondent can quite consistently disapprove of the minister’s dismissal and at the same time give the authorities a 4.4, because the rating is being given for a different function. Holovakha registers precisely this when he says he had not expected Zelensky’s work at the interstate level to be so successful.
This channel is visible in the comments themselves: “I trust the president’s decision” in the camp that favored Fedorov’s dismissal, and “the president knows best; if he made the replacement, then it was necessary” in the Drapatyi case. This is not an assessment of the decision on its merits, but a delegation of the right to make it. Holovakha calls the prewar social contract an electoral democracy: we elected you, so you decide. The war did not abolish it but reinforced it: the circle of those with the right to decide has narrowed, while the volume of what is delegated has grown.
The second source is what Holovakha calls vertical solidarity: the wartime desire to hold together and rally around the center. This is the classic rally-around-the-flag effect, and it is by definition temporary.
The third is legitimacy through results. A rating of the economy that is higher than the prewar one, with a third of the economy lost, measures not GDP but the self-assessment of a society that has held its ground. Before the war, 71% saw no prospects for the country; today a majority believes that in ten years Ukraine will be a normal European country — in 2021, 17% thought so.
The fourth source is not an achievement but a structural fact: the absence of an alternative pole. The opposition receives on average 3.4 points, more than half the sample gives it a 0–3, and 18% cannot rate it at all. For one in five adult Ukrainians the opposition does not exist even as an object of judgment. Dissatisfaction with specific decisions has nowhere to flow — and therefore does not convert into any movement in the ratings.
Here another classic framework is apt — Albert Hirschman’s triad of “exit — voice — loyalty.” When exit is blocked (there are no elections, no alternative is in sight, and for the majority the very framing of the question of changing those in power during wartime is unacceptable), dissatisfaction chooses voice. The July rallies are precisely voice in pure form: not an attempt to replace those in power, but an attempt to adjust their decisions. Some respondents read the street pressure directly as a source of mandate: “people are for him, so he should stay.” Holovakha adds a symmetrical storyline — he interprets the replacement of Syrskyi as reverse vertical solidarity, the authorities’ response to an articulated demand.
Here, however, lies the main caveat to the entire construction. In Easton, diffuse support is addressed to the regime and to institutions — bearers that outlive particular individuals. In the Ukrainian case it is addressed to a large extent to a person. Such support behaves like diffuse support — it is stable and insensitive to individual decisions — but it draws its vulnerability from specific support: it rests on a single bearer and a single function. As long as the president performs the function society considers the principal one, personnel conflicts within the defense vertical do not touch the rating. The moment that function falters — on the negotiation track, for instance — the fall will have no institutional shock absorber, because in a normal construction the shock absorber is trust in institutions, not in a person. Personification, then, explains not only the sturdiness of this rating but also why that sturdiness may prove deceptive.
What Follows from This
First. The stability of the rating of those in power during the week of the loudest public dissent in a year is not a mandate of approval. It is rather a line of credit extended against an expected result. The persistent optimism (48% expect improvement, against 20% pessimists) rests not on sympathy for institutions and not on faith in individuals, but on that very expectation. Such an asset cannot be spent twice.
Second. The absence of delegitimation is not a blank check. Society has demonstrated the existence of an articulated standard for personnel decisions and a readiness to apply it equally to a civilian minister and to the commander-in-chief — regardless of who makes those decisions. A decision that goes against the standard generates organized resistance; a decision that meets the standard receives concrete, biographically grounded support.
Third. The communications conclusion is straightforward. An audience that checks statements against its own and its family’s experience does not respond to a purely narrative explanation of personnel decisions. An explanation that wants to be heard must speak the language of results — the same language the respondents themselves speak.
Fourth, and the least comfortable. Voice without an institutional channel seeks the street. As long as the protest energy remains concrete and has no political beneficiary, this is a sign of health rather than of crisis. But the configuration “no exit, no alternative, only voice” is stable exactly as long as those in power respond to that voice. The real line of risk, moreover, runs not between the authorities and an opposition that society does not see, but between generations: by Holovakha’s observation, Fedorov’s dismissal was felt most acutely by young people, for whom he embodied a way of waging war with less risk to themselves.
Caveats
The data on which this column relies were obtained from a sample of 432 respondents, divided into two halves with one case in each; the statistical margin of error for the individual cases reaches 7%. This is enough to see the structure of public opinion and its reasoning, but too little for fine comparisons between subgroups. The comparisons with prewar ratings of the authorities and the economy are cited with reference to the Institute of Sociology and require separate verification against the dynamic time series of the monitoring survey.
And the main substantive limitation: none of the figures cited testifies to the managerial or military expediency of the two July decisions. They testify to something else — that a stable criterion has taken shape in Ukrainian society by which such decisions are judged, and that this criterion operates independently of one’s attitude toward whoever makes them.
