#  The Street as a Second Chamber: Why Ukrainians Are Protesting Again, and What It Says About Democracy During Wartime 

 



##### Anastasiia Vlasenko

*Updated August 21, 2026. Day-by-day and city-by-city figures are drawn from the* [*KSE Center for Sociological Research’s media collection*](https://github.com/KSE-Sociological-Center/fedorov-protests-2026) *of the Fedorov wave (by Valentyn Hatsko), whose latest snapshot covers July 16 to August 6, the wave’s twenty-second consecutive day; the long-run series is from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), coded through July 2026; trust figures are from the Razumkov Center’s November 2025 institutional survey. Crowd estimates are preliminary and represent each day’s peak.*

   ![Protest in Kyiv’s Ivan Franko Square. Photo by Anastasiia Tykha](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-08/vlasenko-franko-sq-protest.png?itok=PbFeYhxp) 

 

Protest in Kyiv’s Ivan Franko Square. Photo by Anastasiia Tykha.On the morning of July 16, 2026, a veteran named Dmytro Koziatynskyi called people to Kyiv’s Ivan Franko Square, a strip of pavement a few minutes’ walk from the presidential office, and they arrived holding torn box-flaps lettered by hand. *Hands off Fedorov. Drones for the army, not epaulettes. If it works, don’t touch it.* The signs were cardboard, and in Ukraine, that is never an accident. The cardboard is something like a uniform: no party flags, no printed banners, nothing that could be bought, branded, or later waved around as proof of a foreign plot. Just handwriting, which is hard to fake into a conspiracy.

What had brought them out was, on paper, a piece of ordinary executive housekeeping. President Volodymyr Zelensky had dismissed his 35-year-old defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. He was just six months in the post and the public face of the drone program, a central component of Ukraine’s defense effort against Russia’s full-scale invasion. According to lawmakers in Zelensky’s own party, the firing followed friction between Fedorov and the top brass over his efforts to reform the military’s conscription system and a quieter anxiety inside the president’s circle that a minister this popular was turning into a rival. In most democracies, that is a two-day story: reported, chewed over by pundits, forgotten by the weekend. This one, however, was not forgotten. *Kyiv Post*’s [reporting on the episode](https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/80433) and the *Kyiv Independent*’s survey of soldiers and activists, who called the dismissal [“utterly baffling,”](https://kyivindependent.com/utterly-baffling-soldiers-activists-slam-fedorovs-removal-as-defense-minister/) both treated it as a genuine political crisis rather than a routine reshuffle.

The crowds of people who came out with their cardboard signs also did not treat this as a regular personnel dispute. They came back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. The Kyiv turnout was roughly 2,000 on Thursday, July 16. It beat that on Friday, held fast on Saturday, and on Sunday swelled past 5,000, even as the Cabinet installed an acting minister and made plain it had no intention of backing down. And that, it turned out, was only the opening act. The wave ran for at least twenty-two consecutive days, thinning into nightly vigils of a few hundred before surging back on July 31, its sixteenth day, when a united protest march brought roughly 6,000 people to Ivan Franko Square by police estimate, the largest crowd of the entire wave (Figure 1). Nor was any of it limited to the capital. In all, rallies were documented in thirty-three cities and towns, from Uzhhorod in the far west to Sumy and Kharkiv, both within artillery range of the front. In frontline Kherson, too exposed to shelling for anyone to stand in a square, people joined online instead (Figure 2).

With elections suspended by martial law, the street has become wartime Ukraine’s substitute legislature, the channel through which citizens contest decisions made at the top and sometimes reverse them. The Fedorov protests are the second major test of that channel in two summers, and the first to end in a split decision: the street forced out the commander-in-chief, but it could not win the minister back.

 ![Figure 1](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/2026-08/Figure1.jpg)

 

Figure 1. The Kyiv protests defied the usual decay curve: after the 5,000-strong opening weekend, the wave thinned into nightly vigils, then peaked on its sixteenth day, when the united march of July 31 drew roughly 6,000 people, the only police-estimated crowd of the wave. Estimated peak crowd at Kyiv rallies by day, July 16 to August 6, 2026. ![Figure 2](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/2026-08/Figure2.jpg)

 

Figure 2. The wave was national from the first morning: thirty-three cities and towns over three weeks, their true coordinates tracing the shape of Ukraine. Point size marks each locality’s peak crowd; front-line Kherson joined online only.The numbers tell only part of the story. Some of the most revealing gatherings were also the smallest. In Zaporizhzhia, some sixty people stood on Shevchenko Boulevard through an air-raid alert. Among them was a woman holding a photograph of her son, killed near Pokrovsk. In Kharkiv, when the sirens sounded, the rally simply moved into a metro underpass for ten minutes and then came back up. In Kolomyia, a town that appears in none of the national round-ups, eleven young people stood outside the town hall, the smallest protest of the wave, and it still counted. In Rivne, the crowd paused mid-rally to pay respects to the family of a fallen soldier. In Sumy, close enough to Russia that a mass gathering is a genuine risk to people’s lives, people planted single-person pickets by the Sadko fountain and left cardboard signs propped on benches and railings around the city. Someone kept tearing them down, and someone kept putting them back.

Fedorov himself did something startling. Rather than bask in the support or disown it, he addressed the protesters directly. *The Ukrainian people did not come out for a specific minister, Fedorov*, he said. *They came out for themselves.* He turned down the president’s offer of an advisory job, and he asked the crowds, without suggesting they leave, not to let the moment tip into something that might destabilize a country at war. It is rare for a dismissed minister to address crowds gathered in his name at all, and rarer still for one to tell them the protest is not about him. In this case, the description was accurate: as the following weeks showed, the movement’s object was larger than any one minister’s job.

To understand how a defense reshuffle could trigger such a response, it is important to rewind exactly one year. On July 22, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada voted to strip Ukraine’s two flagship [anti-corruption agencies](https://www.huri.harvard.edu/ukraine-judicial-institutions), the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), of their independence, handing effective control to the prosecutor general. Crowds filled the square by the Ivan Franko Theatre in what was, by most counts, the largest anti-government demonstration since the full-scale invasion began. The press named it the [“Cardboard Revolution,”](https://www.huri.harvard.edu/zelenskys-anti-corruption-missteps-experts-respond) after the hand-lettered signs. *New Voice of Ukraine* called it a [“cardboard Maidan.”](https://english.nv.ua/opinion/ukraine-s-cardboard-maidan-forces-rollback-of-anti-corruption-power-grab-50550217.html) Within days it had spread nationwide. And within roughly a week Zelensky, who had signed the bill, reversed his decision and signed a new one restoring the agencies’ independence.

The Fedorov protests are the second entry in what is starting to look like a pattern: in wartime Ukraine, when a decision at the top of the state smells of faction or self-interest, people take to the streets to show their discontent. This reaction pushes back against almost everything we assume about politics under fire: that war concentrates power, silences dissent, and makes citizens defer. In Ukraine, at the very least, war has not extinguished democratic engagement: even under martial law, citizens retain both the will and the capacity to contest their government’s decisions in public.

The longer record shows just how unusual this is. Before 2022, Ukraine was a country of routine street politics, with well over a hundred demonstrations in an average month. Martial law nearly erased that option: by mid-2022, recorded demonstrations fell to essentially zero, and they have crept back only partway (Figure 3). Against that flattened baseline, two spikes stand out like signal flares. By ACLED’s count, July 2026 produced 185 recorded demonstration events, not only far above the 102 of July 2025 but the largest monthly total of the entire war, and the largest of any month since 2019. This is not the ordinary churn of a peacetime democracy. These demonstrations are the rare occasions when something pulls Ukrainians into the street against their own government in a period when almost nothing else does. And the stakes of coming out are hard to overstate: martial law restricts mass assembly, and a crowd in an open square is exposed in a country under near-daily missile and drone attack. In wartime Ukraine, standing on a square is itself an act of physical courage.

 ![Figure 3](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/2026-08/Figure3.jpg)

 

Figure 3. Recorded demonstrations collapsed under martial law and returned only partially, leaving the two wartime civic surges to stand out against an unusually quiet baseline: 102 events in July 2025, and 185 in July 2026, the largest protest month of the war. Monthly demonstration events, 2018-2026. ACLED counts events, not crowd sizes; August 2026 is omitted as partial.#### Democracy With Elections Switched Off

The significance of these protests is greater in the context of wartime Ukraine: the usual mechanisms of accountability are not active. Under the constitution, no national election can be held while martial law is in force. The presidential and parliamentary votes, due in spring and autumn 2024, respectively, have both been suspended for the duration of martial law. Zelensky governs by the operation of this law, not by a fresh mandate. Parliament still sits, but its own composition has not faced voters in years, and Ukrainians know it: in the [Razumkov Center’s November 2025 survey](https://unn.ua/en/news/poll-ukrainians-trust-the-armed-forces-of-ukraine-the-most-the-verkhovna-rada-the-least), 76 percent of Ukrainians said they distrust the Verkhovna Rada, even as 92 percent said they trust the Armed Forces (Figure 4). The gap between the institutions fighting the war and the institutions meant to represent the people who fund and fight it is the widest in the survey.

 ![Figure 4](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/2026-08/Figure4.jpg)

 

Figure 4. The accountability gap in one picture: Ukrainians overwhelmingly trust the institutions fighting the war and overwhelmingly distrust the ones meant to represent them. Razumkov Center national survey, November 2025.Political theorists describe this as a “representation gap.” The valve that normally releases political pressure, the next election, is closed. The claim that Zelensky intends to rule without elections indefinitely circulates mostly in Kremlin messaging and its far-right Western echoes; his own commitments and steady Western pressure both point toward a vote once a ceasefire makes one possible. But for now, the valve is shut, and the pressure has to go somewhere else.

In a working democracy, elections are not the only check on power. Courts, the press, opposition parties, and civil society all do their part. But elections are the main check; the others are meant to reinforce them, not replace them. Taking elections out, even temporarily and for good reason, means that everything else has to bear more weight than it was designed for. Ukraine’s press keeps working, even under wartime constraints. Its courts keep functioning, though 2025 showed how quickly the anti-corruption guarantee can become shaky. Opposition politics is muted by a wartime taboo, honored by most parties, against exactly the kind of public infighting Russian propaganda loves to sow. That leaves one channel carrying an unusual share of the current: ordinary people, assembling in public, making themselves impossible to ignore.

This is where the textbook idea of *participatory* democracy stops being an abstraction. The standard contrast is with representative democracy, where citizens hand decisions to elected officials and confine themselves to voting every few years. Participatory models insist on something more direct and continuous, and in its oldest, bluntest form, that means a crowd in the square. Protest is not just a howl of grievance. It is an input, a signal measured in bodies and visibility that resets what those in power believe they can get away with. What is unusual about Ukraine is that this channel is not topping up a healthy electoral system, the way protest does in stable democracies. Rather, it is standing in for one.

The war has, paradoxically, strengthened the very muscles protest depends on. Survey research on wartime Ukraine finds that support for democracy has risen steeply since the full-scale invasion, and that exposure to the fighting has not produced the reflexive deference to authority that the classic “rally ’round the flag” literature would predict, though [scholars caution](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00223433251347769) that the effects of direct victimization are not uniform across democratic principles (for instance, the cited study, based on nationally sampled surveys by the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology, documents the wartime surge in overall support for democracy while finding that Ukrainians who suffered direct losses are somewhat less supportive of one of its principles, minority-rights protection). A population that has spent years organizing horizontally to survive shelling, mount local defense, and shelter the displaced has also developed the reflexes that make protest possible. The woman in Zaporizhzhia with her son’s photograph, the eleven in Kolomyia, and the pickets in Sumy: they are not waiting for anyone’s permission.

#### When Protest Becomes Policy

The 2025 anti-corruption episode is the clearest evidence that this is a real feedback loop and not just catharsis. On July 22, 2025, Parliament passed a law stripping Ukraine’s two flagship anti-corruption bodies, NABU and SAPO, of their independence; the president signed it, the crowds came within days, the protest spread and held for about a week, and the president reversed the very law he had just signed. Protest was a fast, extra-electoral mechanism for revising a government decision in near-real time, arguably faster than any ballot could have delivered the same resolution.

What made these protests so effective? The issue they addressed was concrete: the independence of the anti-corruption bodies was something a wide slice of Ukrainian society, reformers, NGOs, and ordinary people sick of elite impunity—had reason to defend. Watchdog groups like the Anti-Corruption Action Center helped turn a technical legislative maneuver into a clear public issue and mobilize people around it. And, crucially, there was an audience abroad: EU accession is tied to exactly this kind of reform, so a mass protest against a rollback threatened Ukraine’s standing with the partners funding its defense. The pressure was not only moral; it was also clearly financial.

The speed is itself part of the effectiveness. Dr. Emma Mateo, a HURI postdoctoral fellow who [mapped the 2025 protests city by city](https://www.huri.harvard.edu/zelenskys-anti-corruption-missteps-experts-respond) using the regional broadcaster *Suspilne* and local coverage, found rallies in at least fifteen towns on the day the law passed, spreading to at least twenty-seven localities the next evening, including nearly every regional capital under Ukrainian control except shelled Kherson, reaching places like Kryvyi Rih, Kremenchuk, and Mukachevo, alongside Kyiv and Lviv. In [another commentary for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute](https://www.huri.harvard.edu/zelenskys-anti-corruption-missteps-experts-respond), the analyst Yevhen Hlibovytsky set that speed within a longer story. Ukrainians, shaped by generations of estrangement from the state, learned to separate their trust in institutions from their opinion of any given politician, and by 2025, the gap between a skeptical society and its government had grown wide enough to hand the street real leverage. A [VoxUkraine survey](https://voxukraine.org/en/people-with-cardboards-who-were-they-and-why-did-they-come-out-results-of-a-survey-of-protesters-on-franko-square) of the Franko Square crowd in Kyiv filled in the faces: young, networked, mostly unattached to any party. Organic, in other words, and not orchestrated.

#### When Protest Reached Defense Policy

The Fedorov protests in 2026 borrow that structure and push it somewhere more delicate. Anti-corruption is safe ground; nobody argues with a straight face that graft deserves privacy. Who runs the defense ministry is a different matter. Command, conscription, procurement, the drone program: these are exactly the calls most wartime governments, including robustly democratic ones, treat as executive business, walled off from public argument on the theory that war needs the decisiveness and secrecy that a crowd cannot provide. That a reshuffle *inside the defense ministry* drew protesters in thirty-three cities and towns suggests a meaningful slice of Ukrainian society no longer accepts that wall, at least not unconditionally. When a personnel decision looks driven by court politics or a turf war between reformers and the old guard rather than by the needs of the front, it becomes, in their eyes, fair game.

This illustrates a real expansion of what participatory politics claims to cover, and the way the 2026 wave unfolded delivered a more complicated verdict on how the feedback loop works. For the first five days, the government projected firmness: Parliament confirmed a new prime minister while pointedly leaving defense out of the vote, Fedorov turned down an advisory post, and an acting minister was slotted in. Then, on July 21, the sixth day of protests, Zelensky [dismissed Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and appointed Mykhailo Drapatyi](https://kyivindependent.com/breaking-zelensky-dismisses-commander-in-chief-syrskyi-amid-widespread-protests/), the general whom soldiers, veterans, and the protesters themselves had championed. One of the movement’s two demands, the one that had seemed less attainable, was met within a week. The other was not. The crowds thinned into nightly vigils, then surged one final time. The united march of July 31 was the wave’s peak, drawing roughly 6,000 people in Kyiv, alongside additional rallies in some thirty cities across the country. That same day, Zelensky removed Fedorov from the National Security and Defense Council. On August 19, the Rada, back from recess, [confirmed Yevhenii Khmara as defense minister](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/08/19/8049295/) by 312 votes, closing the question of Fedorov’s return to the ministry. Fedorov’s answer came the day before the vote: a video statement [calling for wartime elections](https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/82702), a demand that moves the argument between the street and the state onto new ground.

The upshot is a split decision, and it is the most instructive outcome the pattern has yet produced. The street proved it can bend even defense policy: the commander-in-chief is gone, replaced by the general the crowds named. But it could not compel the decision it began by demanding. The second chamber can be summoned by citizens, and its verdicts can extract real concessions, but they are not binding: the government chooses which half to hear. Whether trading a general for a minister counts as the street winning or the government skillfully conceding the cheaper half of the demand is exactly the question Ukraine’s politics will now test.

#### The Tension Ukraine Has Not Resolved

It would be too neat to file all this under good news for democracy. The Ukrainian case carries tensions it cannot fully resolve while the war lasts. Protest is faster and more responsive than an election, but it is also, in a strict sense, less representative. A few thousand people in the country’s larger cities, however impressive under martial law, are not tens of millions casting secret ballots. It favors those with the time, safety, and inclination to stand in a square, over the soldier at the front, the family displaced to another oblast, the millions who have left the country and cannot make it to Franko Square on a Sunday.

   ![A protester creates a cardboard sign in Kyiv](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-08/protest-cardboard-sign.png?itok=0xnRluF6) 

 

A protester creates a cardboard sign in Kyiv. Photo by Anastasiia Tykha.There is a security cost, too, and it is not hypothetical. Russian information operations hunt for exactly this kind of internal friction, dressing Ukrainian protest up as proof of a country falling apart or a president losing his grip. The risk is real, but it cuts both ways: as the Atlantic Council’s Peter Dickinson [argued during the wave](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/wartime-ukraines-people-power-protests-are-putins-worst-nightmare/), wartime people power is also “Putin’s worst nightmare,” living proof of the democratic culture Russia insists Ukraine lacks. A democracy at war has to hold two things at once: the legitimacy that comes from letting dissent be heard and sometimes win, and the exposure that comes from letting an enemy watch every fissure. Ukraine’s political class has, to its credit, mostly chosen the first. That choice is not free, and it is not guaranteed to survive as the war grinds on.

Zelensky’s near-instant reversal in 2025 suggested a government that had recalculated how much a mobilized society could safely be ignored. Hlibovytsky draws a sharp contrast with the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, who faced comparable civic pressure at the turn of the century and, more often than not, simply refused to move. The Fedorov standoff tested how durable that lesson really is, against a mobilization larger by every countable measure: 185 recorded demonstration events in July 2026 versus 102 in July 2025, thirty-three documented localities versus twenty-seven, at least twenty-two consecutive days versus roughly one week. This time the government neither folded in a week nor simply dug in. It conceded selectively: five days of firmness, then the commander-in-chief’s dismissal, then a month of waiting out the crowds on the core demand. Maybe that is because the stakes were narrower: one minister’s chair, rather than the whole anti-corruption architecture, and a chair much closer to the operational core of the war. Or maybe it is a colder calculation, that a crowd, unlike an electorate, can be given half an answer and waited out. Either way, the responsiveness 2025 seemed to reveal now looks conditional and strategic, a government rationing its concessions, not a chastened president learning to listen.

#### What the Cardboard Means

What ties July 2025 to July 2026 is not a single grievance. It is a method, one Ukrainian civil society has tried, tested, and refined. When the ballot box is locked away by martial law, and a decision at the top looks like it serves someone’s faction or vanity rather than the war effort, the street becomes the room where the argument happens. This is participatory democracy operating not as decoration of a healthy electoral system but as a load-bearing substitute for one, reaching, now, even into the guarded territory of who commands the armed forces.

It is neither clean nor safe. The summer of 2026 is a reminder that a channel can carry a signal without any guarantee it will be heard in full. After at least twenty-two consecutive days of protest, the movement had unseated a commander-in-chief and still not moved the decision it began with: on August 19, parliament confirmed Khmara, not Fedorov, as minister of defense. But the mechanism is real, consequential enough that a government at war reversed itself outright to answer it one year and bargained with it the next. And it suggests that even under the harshest conditions a democracy can face, the basic instinct to contest power rather than merely endure it is not something war switches off. In Ukraine’s case, it may be one of the few things the war has left remarkably resilient, written, fittingly, on cardboard.

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   ![Anastasiia Vlasenko](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-08/AnastasiiaVlasenko.png?itok=57BCas0I) 

 

**Anastasiia Vlasenko** is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Politics, the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies, and the Program in International Relations. She was a Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, with joint funding from the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (2023-2024). She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from Florida State University (2022 and 2018), an M.A. in International Relations from New York University (2016), an M.Sc. in European Affairs from Lund University (2013), and a B.A. in Political Science from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2011).

Dr. Vlasenko's primary research focuses on electoral politics and democratization, with a specialization in the politics of Ukraine and Russia. She also studies decentralization, local governance, and protest, with additional interests in transitional period reforms, propaganda, legislative politics, and electoral forecasting. Her work has appeared in the *Journal of Politics* and *PS: Political Science & Politics*. At NYU, Columbia University, and Florida State University, she has taught courses on comparative politics, public policy, quantitative methods, Ukrainian politics, and post-Soviet studies.



 



 

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