Hanna Tim: Fedorov and the Deception of Ukrainians

Oh, I read a fresh monumental life story of Mykhailo Fedorov on Ukrainska Pravda titled "The Elections of Mykhailo Fedorov. How the former defense minister outplayed Yermak, became a problem for Zelensky, and hacked fatal disease," and I’ll be a bit more of a witch, because after his statements to Reuters, where the state (in which he himself 7 years held one of the highest positions) issued him a rating of 5% effectiveness, in the eyes of an average reader a drama of an unrecognized genius unfolds. But if you view it through the lens of assessing systemic risks and basic social engineering, it looks like a classic white-threaded operation to save political capital.”

All this long read is gathered according to the oldest monodessign of the hero’s journey, only adjusted for the tastes of visitors to hipster cafes, so all genre rules are observed with apothecary precision: first rising from a poor home, then a call to heroism in the capital, and then — the mandatory descent into hell and physical initiation through suffering.

It starts like a Steve Jobs biography with a Vasilyan accent. Childhood in poverty among bandits and watermelons, where the young hero hardens his will, plays chess and dreams of wooden-salon airplanes. Then a classic call to adventure, where entering the 22-th floor to Zelensky with the idea of pumping up the abs, where he is suddenly told "make a state for us in a smartphone" and he, like a true neo-messiah, responds without hesitation "we can do everything, we just need to figure it out." This is the pure entry into a tale of Silicon Valley, which was successfully sold to us for six years under the guise of reforms.”

Then the plot demands an ascent to an underground realm and a victory over death, where this masterpiece appears — the struggle with an incurable disease by deriving percentages of recovery on his own dashboard. If you trust the data and cleverly set up the graph — the disease recedes. The level of dramaturgy is such that Netflix screenwriters are nervously biting their lips right now.

But the main dramaturgical trick of this text lies elsewhere. Placing a heavy topic of overcoming a deadly disease neatly in the third chapter is a genius, mathematically calibrated gateway to turn off the audience’s critical thinking. Putting it at the beginning would be cheap melodrama, tucking it at the end would look like the pitiful whimpering of a downed pilot facing scrutiny. So they place it exactly before the fourth and fifth chapters, where the bare and bloody minefield of facts begins.

And the facts are unforgiving: embezzlement of 254 million hryvnias in the subordinate State Special Communications Service, chronic conflict with the military command, complaints from the Weaponry Council about contracts frozen until autumn and failed missile procurements for Patriot due to endless internal audits. In a normal state any prudent analyst would clutch their head at such management in a country draining blood. But the reader is let in there under heavy psychological anesthesia. He has just been fed a myth of a demi-god who at six in the morning pours chemotherapy, at eight he already determines the fate of the nation, and the cancer is defeated with a dashboard of percentages. From a pharmacological perspective this is complete nonsense, because a person was saved by strong Western targeted therapies (by his own words), which are not available to everyone, not drawings on a tablet. Yet for the public the myth has already worked, because before us is a cyborg who hacked death itself, and if he deceived death, what claims can there be regarding exploded ammunition deliveries or lack of heavy armor?”

But one more juiciest part begins in the section about the battle of titans in power. Mykhailo Albertovych stands here as the only adult in the room among frightened generals and cynical officials. He personally saves the president from popular anger with cardboard placards, bravely signs memos with NABU right under the nose of the ominous shadow of Yermak, creates an army of drones literally from sticks and blue tea, and when the system proves too old and corrupt for his cosmic vision, it simply rejects him as a foreign body.

And here this cargo-cult of the Silicon Valley bangs into the wall of real physics. In venture capital, the principle "fake it till you make it" works flawlessly — you promise a revolution, sip smoothies in a black oversized suit, show nice graphs, take a round of investments, and if everything fails — the fund writes off the losses. But when you transfer this startup logic to the defense perimeter during total conventional war, it becomes a catastrophe. The state is not an app on a phone where you can roll out a raw release with a bunch of bugs, burn a year’s budget for a pretty dashboard, and then claim that users are inefficient, stolen data aren’t stolen but compiled, and go ahead to raise a private fund in the States or consult Italian generals.”

The finale is a cry-worthy scene, where the hero stands on a Kyiv rooftop against the golden domes, his assistant whispers about his faith in robots, and he himself prepares a new Manhattan project and plans to conquer American venture funds, while exhausted citizens draw his name on cardboard.

In essence, this is not just an article, but a model application for a constructed pre-election biographical myth, where an image of the ideal technocrat is sold without fear or reproach, whose only flaw is that he is too normal for this crazy world, and that after half a year of leading the defense, there remained a hole in the budget, closed doors for weaponry associations, and failed procurements, which simply do not fit into a beautiful ten-slide dashboard. Therefore we have what we have — a brilliant PR armor against criminal cases and audits, assembled according to the templates of ancient epic, behind which hides the banal inability to understand that war cannot be cured by PowerPoint presentations.”

A photo in the background of domes from the Ukrainska Pravda article.

Hanna Tim, author’s page on Facebook

“Argument”

On this topic:

Kostyantyn Korsun: Fedorov and a straggler