Zelenskyy offered Mykhailo Fedorov the post of Deputy Prime Minister for Military Innovations. Fedorov declined. He said he would accept no position other than Minister of Defense.

He is right, and the reason is institutional rather than personal.

A deputy prime minister coordinates. A minister commands. When Fedorov held a deputy premiership before, it came attached to the Ministry of Digital Transformation – a ministry built for him, with staff, budget authority, and the power to execute. That combination produced Diia and Brave1. The title alone produced nothing.

What was offered on Thursday is the title without the ministry. There is no Ministry of Military Innovations. There is no budget line, no procurement authority, no staff, no direct channel to the General Staff.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense controls a budget of roughly a trillion hryvnias and the entire provision chain for the army. A coordinating post outside that structure can convene meetings about drones. It cannot buy them, contract for them, or hold anyone accountable for failing to deliver them.

Fedorov named this precisely: no other role carries the authority to fight procurement corruption, finish the army’s transformation, or root out unaccountability in the system. He was dismissed after six months. The reforms he started remain unfinished. Offering him a coordinating role to smooth over that dismissal treats a governance problem as a public relations problem.

The protests in Ukrainian cities were not about a man’s career. They were about who controls military procurement during a war. That question is still unanswered.