The twenty-two are serious achievements and some are corroborated. Russian units cut off from Starlink. A contract signed for Gripen fighters. And by his numbers: drone interception up from 83 to 91 percent, cruise missile interception from 47 to 87. A ballistics test passed, he notes, on the day the government was dismissed. Most people reading it this week are reading the twenty-two, but I find the three failures more revealing.

The first admitted failure is the reorganization of the ministry to NATO standards. His confession in sum: the new structure was launched, many people were let go, and he should have been more decisive in firing people who slowed his changes. Read it twice. The failure he owns is excessive patience with people blocking him. The delay is his, but other people are still the problem.

The second admitted failure is procurement. He did not move every purchase onto competitive tender. No obstruction this time, just him. Of the three failures Fedorov admits, it is the only one that admits Fedorov. It sits sandwiched between two failures that depend on other people.

The third admitted failure is a culture of personal responsibility for decisions, which he did not manage to build, and which he is confident Ukrainians will build themselves. This failure arrives as a compliment, and the unfinished work is handed back to the nation.

Then there is the failure that is not among the three. It lives in the president’s accounting instead.

When Zelensky appointed Fedorov in January, one of the tasks set before him was the overhaul of Ukraine’s mobilization system, beginning with the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TCC), the draft offices whose relations with the public have turned into open confrontation. On July 8, a week before the dismissal, a group of men in Lviv attacked a TCC vehicle and overturned it.

Explaining Fedorov’s dismissal to lawmakers from his own party, Zelensky said Fedorov never delivered the promised mobilization reform. Zelensky reportedly added that if Putin announces a general mobilization on September 23, “nobody will be thinking about digital reforms.”

Search Fedorov’s farewell post for that failure and you find something stranger than an omission. It is on the list, as number thirteen. In the win column.

Item thirteen says his team began the transformation of military service. He introduces the work as unpopular and as extremely important, then lists its instruments: contracts for everyone with defined terms of service and deferrals, infantry and assault pay among the highest in the world, a foreign recruiting market on transparent terms, new tools to bring back soldiers who left their units without leave. Every instrument is a carrot and every carrot is popular. The unpopular part isn’t mentioned: the Territorial Recruitment Centers and mobilization.

What exactly is going on with mobilization? In the president’s accounting it is the mobilization reform that failed. In the minister’s accounting it is the transformation of the army that began. The incentive half of the problem, including contract design and pay scales, is claimed by Fedorov. This is not a lie. It may be an accurate description of the half he worked on. The half that involves compulsion, enforcement, and the question of who serves when volunteering falls short is not on the list.

The next day Fedorov gave a press conference during protests in Kyiv calling for his reinstatement, and the pattern repeated.

He confirmed that he had proposed replacing both commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and chief of the General Staff Andrii Hnatov, because it was the only way to defeat the enemy “asymmetrically, with minimal losses.” Zelensky refused. After that, Fedorov said his initiatives were blocked. He suggested Syrskyi governed through private meetings and intrigue rather than discussion and “figured out how to split the country.” Fedorov nevertheless gave Syrskyi full credit for saving the country in 2022 and told the room Ukraine should not be like the Russians, that “we should tell the truth.”

He also predicted, one day after his firing, with the streets full, that “the situation will 100% be corrected” because the president hears the Ukrainian people.

As this publishes, Zelensky is weighing that idea.

None of this requires bad faith. The most charitable reading is that Fedorov believes every word, and much of it may be true. The blocking may have been real. The indictment of Syrskyi may be substantially accurate; servicemen have voiced parts of it publicly for years. But a true account of other people’s obstruction is still not an account of himself. Across a twenty-two point achievement list and an hour with the press, Fedorov produced one sentence about his failures without involving other people, and it was about procurement.

Zelensky’s accounting deserves the same test and fails it the same way. He told his party’s lawmakers he could not allow the ministry and the General Staff to fight each other in wartime, that ideally both men would be replaced, and that he could not do both at once. That is a constraint, honestly described. It is not a failure, and no failure was acknowledged. A lawmaker in the room caught it in real time. “That’s an absurd answer,” one said. If the military leadership also needs a reset, why is the minister the one fired?

“Both sides” is often used to equivocate and discredit. The war is not both sides. Russia invaded Ukraine; that is not weighed here because it is not a question. The standard in this essay runs inside Ukraine, among people trying to win the same war, where arguments are supposed to be paid for in evidence and accountings are supposed to cost their authors something. Asymmetry is the correct strategy against Russia. Equal standards are the correct strategy inside Ukraine. Confusing the two is how popular men get exempted, and the exemption is the Soviet instinct.

The protests are real. Thousands within a day in Kyiv and other cities, servicemen and veterans among them; a deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force resigned in solidarity. The political question, who should run Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, belongs to Ukrainians, and their answer is loud. From the outside looking in, I can talk, but I can’t vote.

So instead of the political question, I ask an analytical one: whether a man’s accounting of himself pays the bill. Fedorov, to his credit, kept these two questions apart better than many of his supporters. The people in the streets, he said, were not there for him. They were there for a trajectory they can feel breaking.

A reader in Kyiv could put this down and say it is careful work done at a safe distance. They would be right about the distance.

Fedorov’s post ends with a promise to keep working at the mission he arrived with: to defeat the enemy with asymmetry, speed of innovation, and strength of organization. Then two words. Далі буде. To be continued. Of all the claims in the post, it is the easiest one to believe.

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Graham’s quotes about Trump exhibited range: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it” in 2016. Ten years later, following his 2026 primary win: “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God, but we’re gonna start with him.”

Lindsey Graham made a calculation. Instead of joining the opposition to Trump, he believed he could influence Trump from inside the party. Having witnessed Flake, Sasse, and Cheney lose their power, Graham decided opposition would not work. Perhaps he believed himself the exception to the rule: that despite initially rejecting Trump wholesale, he could work his way into the President’s good graces and then influence him.

To His Credit

Graham proposed the “bone-crushing” sanctions bill for Russia in April 2025. Since then, Russia has killed or injured more than 21,000 civilians in Ukraine1. The sanctions bill drew 84 cosponsors, easily crossing the two-thirds threshold required to override a presidential veto. In January 2026, Graham declared that Trump had “greenlit” the bill. Days before his death in July, Graham announced that the White House had agreed to a version it would support.

Shortly after his death, a successor bill was unveiled: it renegotiated the 500% tariff on buyers of Russian energy down to at most 100%, applied to the top five buyers at the President's discretion. In fairness, it now requires a report to Congress before sanctions can be lifted. It has 26 cosponsors and counting.

It appears his death served as an impetus for renewed action. If so, what does that say about the politics Graham spent a decade trying to influence?

To his credit, Graham visited Ukraine 10 times since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. And to his credit, Graham enabled Trump’s presidency for 10 years.

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Eleven Catholic priests and up to two thousand Poles were killed in Volodymyr-Volynskyi in early summer 1943, the priests during services in the churches, the rest on the streets, by the Banderites. Except that never happened.

Polish historians told their state news agency in 2024 that no such massacre had taken place in that town. That was two years ago, which means this is not news.

I was born in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, shortened in 2021 to Volodymyr, but I grew up in America.

On July 5, 2026 Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, published a batch of files on Dmytro Klyachkivsky. Only one document was new. Klyachkivsky was born in Zbarazh in 1911. He was an activist in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and sentenced to death, commuted to ten years in the camps. He escaped from Berdychiv prison in July 1941. From 1943 he commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Volhynia under the aliases Klim Savur and Okhrim.

The release centers on two documents: one old, and one new. The old one is dated August 4, 1943. Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKGB’s Fourth Directorate relays to Pyotr Fedotov of the Second an agent’s report from Volodymyr: during services in the churches, Banderites killed eleven priests and up to two thousand Poles on the streets. Polish historians have known this report since 2008 and rejected it then.

The new one is dated July 1944, and in it Sudoplatov tells his superior that the identity of the UPA commander has been established, using a 1938 photograph of a Ukrainian sports club. Klyachkivsky is in the picture. This is a new file, but Klyachkivsky is already known.

What historians have reconstructed is that in June 1943 Klyachkivsky issued a directive for the physical liquidation of the Polish population of Volhynia, and that he issued it orally. Spoken, not written. It survives through testimony, not paper.

Only Kremlin-linked outlets carried this release as news. No independent newsroom has authenticated the rest of the files, and the FSB does not supply proof for what it declassifies.

The timing was predictable. The files dropped six days before July 11, Poland’s national day of remembrance for the Volhynia dead, and into the worst Polish-Ukrainian breach in years, the one that opened when Kyiv gave a military unit the honorific title “Heroes of the UPA” and Warsaw took back Zelensky’s White Eagle award.

Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) calls Klyachkivsky the main perpetrator of the Volhynia genocide. Warsaw said it first and said it without Moscow’s help.

The archive is genuine. The massacre at Volodymyr in it is not. Polish historians did not fight over the papers; they fought the report inside it, an agent’s account of a slaughter that did not occur, preserved in a file that did.

Which leaves the question the files cannot answer. If the FSB knew Klyachkivsky, why did it need Bandera?

Klyachkivsky gave the order. Roman Shukhevych endorsed the Volhynia campaign and then directed the cleansing of Poles from Galicia. Stepan Bandera spent those months in a German camp at Sachsenhausen. The files never name him directly. They say Banderites instead, and the word carries the man.

Klyachkivsky is documented, real, and damning. But that name doesn’t carry the way Bandera does: already known, a face, a flag in Lviv, a Kremlin talking point for over twenty years. Klyachkivsky has to be introduced and explained.

Ukraine honors them both. Streets carry Klyachkivsky’s name and a monument to him stands in Rivne. That statue is the hardest fact in this essay, and the hardest fight, which is why almost nobody picks it. Arguing about Bandera lets Poland argue with a prisoner and lets Ukraine defend a martyr Moscow made famous. Arguing about the man in Rivne would mean arguing about the order and the dead. Only one of the two names travels. Poland reaches for Bandera. Russia reaches for Bandera. Klyachkivsky has a statue and no reputation.

It works like a trap. Point out that Bandera was in a camp and you are correct, and you sound like someone arguing a technicality over dead bodies.

Kyiv saw the files coming, to the day. On July 4th Andrii Kovalenko of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation warned that the FSB would publish falsified Volhynia documents the next day, and named the operation’s overseer: Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s own director. The FSB delivered on schedule, July 5th. Its statement called the killings the genocide of Poles in Volhynia, Warsaw’s official term, the one Kyiv rejects. Wirtualna Polska called the release a cap gun the same day. A day later, July 6th, Notes from Poland summed up the Polish reception: skepticism and ridicule.

Damian Markowski of the Pilecki Institute, a Polish state research institute, told Onet the files contained “no bombshell.” Historia.org.pl pointed out that part of the material had passed through Russian hands two years earlier and was dismissed as unreliable then.

This was not Polish virtue. It was an ordinary week: historians rejected an empty document, and the media got a laugh out of Russia’s attempted fraud.

Then Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram that the document showed, with all the details, whom Warsaw supplies weapons to: “the followers of the killers of their own ancestors.” She does not mean Klyachkivsky. Banderite began as a faction name, the OUN-B, the Bandera wing of the split OUN. The Soviets stretched it across the whole OUN. Then it took in the UPA. Then Ukrainians in general. Zakharova’s version now covers every soldier Poland arms.

The document had failed. And yet many still reach for Bandera.

Polish President Nawrocki campaigned in 2025 on the idea that Ukraine could not join the EU or NATO until it accounted for its crimes against 120,000 of its neighbors.

And Polish Deputy Prime Minister Kosiniak-Kamysz said “With Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the EU”. Except he never said that.

Those words were spoken by the interviewer, Marek Tejchman of Polsat News. Polsat misattributed the quote to Kosiniak-Kamysz in the text of its own report, despite hosting the interview video itself. What Kosiniak-Kamysz actually said was harder to headline: “It’s like President Zelensky said: ‘No one will tell us who we can honor,’ just like no one will tell us how to vote on the entry of any state into the European Union.”

Subsequent outlets repeated the text instead of watching the video: Gazeta Wyborcza, Onet, Radio Zet, Interia, the Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, Polish Radio’s Ukrainian service. The same Onet that published Markowski rejecting the FSB files.

Notes from Poland published a fact-check on July 1st, correcting the record on Kosiniak-Kamysz, four days before the FSB published anything. On July 6th it corrected the FSB.

Russia Today’s coverage of the FSB files carried the misattributed Kosiniak-Kamysz quote as well, six days after the correction.

But Kosiniak-Kamysz did say, in 2024, that Poland would not allow Ukraine into the EU until the Volhynia issue was resolved. The true statement sat out in the open for two years. The misattributed Bandera quote crossed three countries in days.

Ukrainska Pravda called the FSB documents fake on the morning the campaign began. It also carried the Bandera quote five days earlier.

In Poland, Nawrocki and the right-wing opposition have proposed laws banning “Banderism”, alongside Nazism, fascism, and communism. No mention of Klyachkivsky.

The genuine archive points to Klyachkivsky; the fabricated massacre points to Bandera.

Eleven Catholic priests and two thousand Poles who did not die in Volodymyr. The lie is a relocation, but it kept one true thing: the church services. On Sunday, July 11, 1943, the UPA attacked Poles at mass in the village churches of the county around that town. In Chrynów they killed about 150 people at the church, Father Jan Kotwicki among them. In Zabłoćce they broke Father Józef Aleksandrowicz‘s neck and left him on the altar steps. In Poryck they came through the church doors with grenades; 222 dead. Across Volhynia that Sunday the UPA murdered at least 3,102 Poles in 97 villages and colonies and 13 estates, and the historians who counted, Ewa Siemaszko and Tomasz Bereza, say that number is not complete. The next day, the Orthodox feast of Peter and Paul, at least 2,020 dead.

Kotwicki does not travel. Chrynów does not travel. Bandera does. That is what a lie costs.

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As I approached the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, the weeds between the cobblestone resembled the stinkweed that plagues my Arizona backyard. Yet, my nose detected nothing unusual here. Perhaps my senses were dulled. I had just traveled into Warsaw by train from Kyiv, where I volunteered with the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade to deliver vehicles to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was their 55th convoy since the full-scale war began.

The news was ablaze with a political row: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had mailed the Order of the White Eagle back to Poland, the country’s highest honor. President Karol Nawrocki had moved to strip him of it after Zelensky named a new military unit, “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA refers to the controversial Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a symbol of resistance for many Ukrainians and a symbol of Nazi collaboration for many Poles.

As for me, I was born in 1991 in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, since shortened to Volodymyr, one of the oldest towns in Ukraine, in the region of Volhynia, also shortened to Volyn. The same Volhynia where the UPA massacred up to 100,000 Poles.

Following the collapse of the USSR, when I was just 9 months old, my family moved to the United States, and we became Ukrainian Americans. My ancestry, according to DNA matching, is 53% Ukrainian and 34% Polish.

It feels a bit like my parents arguing again.

On December 7th 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously knelt at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, a moment that crystallized 25 years of rebuilding and marked a new chapter for German-Polish relations.

Could Ukrainians and Poles do the same, I wondered.

The monument featured many small stones at its base. This is a Jewish custom of remembrance: a flower wilts and fades, but a stone remains. The gesture emphasizes the weight of the Holocaust’s history, where the German state attempted the systematic annihilation of Europe’s Jews. Brandt’s visit occurred 25 years after the end of WWII, a full generation later, from a Western-aligned, sovereign, and prosperous Germany.

Today it seems everyone wants Ukraine to produce its Brandt moment. Poland’s president has tied it to EU membership; the rest of us, diaspora included, simply find the waiting uncomfortable.

But Brandt knelt because no one told him to. The power of the gesture was that it was both unprompted and politically costly. A repentance produced on demand is not the same act.

And yet, present-day Ukraine faces its generational enemy in an existential struggle for survival and independence. The work of reconciliation between Ukraine and Poland has been deferred, perhaps naturally, in the face of death.

Can a nation kneel in repentance while being forced to stand in defense?

Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had made real reconciliation efforts. Monuments were built, presidents knelt and laid wreaths. War disturbed that momentum and forced Ukraine to reach for symbols that say, “we did not surrender”. And yet the deeper work did not stop. Exhumations of Polish victims, frozen since 2017, resumed in 2025, and 42 of the dead were exhumed at Puzhnyky and reburied with both countries’ culture ministers present.

What is not in dispute is the horror. The massacre was systematic, and most of its victims were women and children. What remains contested is everything after: how to weigh a movement that fought for independence and slaughtered its Polish neighbors in the same years, and what that memory should demand of the present. Ukraine does not formally deny the killings. It defers the argument over their meaning to peacetime. When Zelensky returned the medal, he noted that Poland had never stripped the same honor from Catherine II, who partitioned Poland out of existence, or from Mussolini. The Order has survived more questionable company than a Ukrainian president fighting for his country’s life.

A people who can stand this fiercely, I suspect, will be able to kneel just as fully.

Today, behind the monument, the museum’s flag stood, and beside it the flags of Poland and Ukraine.

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We do not always understand what we are looking at. Propaganda efforts, misdirection, and deliberate confusion are now constants of online life. But understanding is secondary. What matters is that we feel the dissonance. We feel the gap between how the powerful live and how the rest of the world survives.

This is why so much contemporary politics is dismissed as “grievance politics.” To the extent that people are expressing grievance, the label is accurate, and the impulse should be taken seriously. Grievance is what emerges when global visibility makes inequality impossible to ignore: when the legacies of figures like Epstein coexist with claims of moral authority, when self-described communist systems produce billionaires, or when daily images of abundance sit alongside the knowledge that hundreds of thousands still starve each year.

The internet did not invent these contradictions. It simply made them impossible to look away from. Much like the printing press enabled the development and distribution of pamphlets & newspapers, a critical force in motivating the American Revolution by highlighting ideas like “taxation without representation”, the internet motivated Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity (Euromaidan). American colonists wanted alignment with their government, a government that works in the interest of the people it governs. And so, Ukrainians set out on a quest of self-determination, to have a government that works in Ukraine’s interest, rather than Russia’s.

That is to say, the spirit of the 1776 American Revolution, is not limited to American history, it is alive in present-day Ukraine. And it is thanks to the internet that Ukraine can demonstrate a new kind of democracy: digital and transparent, accessible by all, and conducted with dignity and integrity.