Mykhailo Fedorov — Ukraine’s former minister of digital transformation, dismissed by President Volodymyr Zelensky last month in a political shake-up that sparked the largest protests in Kyiv since 2022 — will join Italy’s defense ministry as a paid advisor on innovation in the defense sector. He announced the role on Telegram on Aug. 28.
Fedorov — who became minister at 29 and is the youngest minister in European history — was dismissed in a cabinet reshuffle that drew mass protests. In a series of post-departure interviews he gave, he accused the Ukrainian government of slowly losing the war and called for an audit of the military’s supply chain, including the procurement of drone countermeasures he said were not being delivered to the front.
‘I am grateful to Guido Crosetto for his personal support and for the invitation to become his advisor on defense innovation,’ Fedorov said on Telegram. His staff told Corriere della Sera that the work is unpaid.
Crosetto, who has been pushing for what he calls ‘a new generation of defense tech — from autonomous weapons to AI-enabled targeting — for the Italian defense industry,’ confirmed the arrangement in a statement.
The move lands in a fraught moment for Italy’s own defense industry. Rome is one of the European countries whose defense exports to Ukraine have grown, but domestic production capacity remains a constraint. The ministry has called for expanded partnerships with the defense firms of the Gulf, particularly the UAE, whose weapons makers have offered joint ventures to Italy as a way to close the supply gap.
Fedorov will be in Washington on Sept. 2–5. He is expected to meet Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and owner of the Starlink satellite network that has become the backbone of Ukrainian military communications. In Kyiv, Starlink subscriptions are distributed through a program Fedorov personally managed before the reshuffle. His staff declined to confirm the meeting but said ‘the topic of discussion is the future of satellite communications in war.’