Who Is Ukraine’s New Defense Minister?
Consider the split screen of the past week in Kyiv. On August 18, Mykhailo Fedorov—the popular former defense minister whose dismissal in July set off the largest wartime protests since the summer of 2025—posted a video calling for Ukraine to find a way to hold elections during the war, the first such demand from a major political figure since the full-scale invasion began, and one widely read in Kyiv as laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign.
The next morning, Ukraine's Parliament confirmed Khmara as minister of defense by a constitutional majority. He had resigned his commission as a major general the day before, to satisfy the law's requirement that a civilian lead the ministry, and took the oath with a characteristically unadorned promise: more Ukrainian weapons, and more precise strikes.
One man left the defense debate for politics. The other took an oath to run the war. Almost all the attention followed the first man out the door. But with the confirmation vote behind him, the more useful question is no longer whether Khmara deserves the job but rather who is the man of the hour—and whether his skills, expertise, and strategic judgment fit this particular moment of the war.
On paper, Khmara is the consummate special operations officer: commander of the elite Alpha Group of the SBU, Ukraine's Security Service, and then head of the service itself. While he was still leading the SBU’s Special Operations Center, his units took part in Operation Spiderweb in June 2025—a multi-layered operation involving many parts of the service, of which Khmara’s unit carried out one stage: its operators controlled the drones that struck Russia’s strategic aircraft at air bases thousands of miles from Ukraine. Around $1 million worth of drones inflicted more than $5 billion in damage to Russia's strategic bomber fleet, according to Ukraine's Ministry of Defense. This is a loss that Moscow cannot quickly repair or replace.
In person, there is nothing of the door-kicker about Khmara. He is modest, articulate and unhurried, with an understated charm and a habit of answering questions by broadening them—a query about a raid becomes a reflection on leadership; a question about weapons becomes one about people. Former colleagues describe a commander who spent most of his time at or near the front—a big-picture thinker, a quick learner, continually curious—and the respect he commands across the force is not the manufactured kind. Many generals claim as much. The difference is that the soldiers Khmara commanded appear to believe him.
Those instincts matter more than they might seem, because the job he now holds is, at its heart, a trust-and-systems job. Ukraine's defense minister does not command troops; he builds the machine behind them—procurement, industrial coordination, budgets, personnel, the politics between institutions. And this is where Khmara's record is most persuasive. The Alpha Group's personnel constitute a minuscule portion of Ukraine's armed forces. Still, it is credited with a wildly disproportionate share of the damage inflicted on Russia—by the service's own accounting, up to 20 percent of all enemy infantry casualties.
More telling is what happened to the Russian oil industry in the seven months he ran the SBU: Ukraine's long-range campaign against Russian refining matured under him in scale, tempo, and logic. Kyiv's General Staff now assesses that nearly 43 percent of Russia's refining capacity has been knocked out. Independent estimates are more conservative, but Russia's own statistics recorded a double-digit drop in refined petroleum output this year, and one of the world's largest oil producers is now importing fuel and rationing gasoline. In large part, this is the result of the campaign Khmara helped oversee.
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