FlashFeed

Full text

KYIV — There could not be a worse moment for an internal brawl, but that is exactly what’s unfolding in Kyiv, with a hasty reshuffle underway to make spy chief Yevhenii Khmara Ukraine’s new interim defense minister.

Instead of talking about how to maintain the wartime initiative it has enjoyed over Russia this year, Ukraine is seething over President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to oust 35-year-old tech prodigy and reformer Mykhailo Fedorov , adored by Ukraine’s partners and people, from the defense brief.

The reason — Fedorov’s acrimonious relationship with Ukraine’s Army Commander Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi.

“Those two could not work together. A wartime president must not face such choices, honestly. I want unity, but the sides did not find it. I respect both,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday.

“They even refused to sit at the same table without me,” he added. “I had to make a choice.”

That choice, to get rid of rogue reformer Fedorov, who in his six months in office launched major positive changes in the army, shocked many prominent Ukrainian service members and watchdogs, and surprised foreign partners.

Ukrainians held another cardboard protest on Thursday, demanding that Zelenskyy return Fedorov to the ministry. In the evening, Zelenskyy announced that Khmara, who is acting head of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency, will fill the vacancy — but only in an acting capacity, until he can formally resign from the military to take up the civilian role.

Fedorov vs Syrskyi

Fedorov said that Syrskyi forced Zelenskyy’s hand into pushing him out. Though Fedorov was also reportedly pushing for Syrskyi’s removal for a long time. The general has a reputation as a butcher and as a Soviet general, rewarding loyalists and destroying the initiative of field commanders.

“When the president said he has no plans to fire [Syrskyi], I accepted and was ready to learn how to work with him, because we both have one goal — to serve the Ukrainian people. But what we faced was that all our initiatives were blocked. Syrskyi was not ready to openly discuss problems, but was instead plotting against us and finally set an ultimatum for me to be out,” Fedorov said at a press conference in Kyiv on Thursday.

“Instead of figuring out how to asymmetrically defeat Russia, which is the task of the commander-in-chief, he figured out how to split the country,” Fedorov added.

He praised Syrskyi’s military talent but said the general wants to keep fighting the old ways while war is rapidly changing and becoming more technological every day.

Syrskyi reacted with a condescending remark, saying that it is only because of his past successful operations, such as the battle for Kyiv in 2022, that Fedorov can now speak freely in the Ukrainian capital.

Oleksandr Syrskyi speaks to journalists during a training exercise at an unspecified location in Ukraine in June 2023. | Ed Ram/Getty Images

“We managed to defend our capital, and now briefings can be held in this city, visions can be formed, decisions can be made. I will make every effort to ensure that similar events can take place in a free and independent Ukraine. To do this, we need to focus on the war and on an effective strategy that is now demonstrating concrete results,” Syrskyi said in a social media post .

He also thanked Fedorov for his work and expressed hope “he would stay in Team Ukraine.” There’s no news yet on where Fedorov will end up.

An official of the General Staff of the Ukrainian army refused to give any more reactions, saying the military “can’t comment on presidential decisions and politically charged statements.”

Positive aura

In the six months he was in office, Fedorov persuaded Elon Musk’s SpaceX to switch off Starlink terminals being used by the Russian military, creating chaos for the Kremlin’s forces. He also helped push the mid-range strike campaign that uses drones to hit targets up to 100 kilometers behind the front lines, disrupting Russian logistics and slowing enemy territorial gains.

Zelenskyy hired Fedorov because he had a strategic vision of war, while the army prefers tactics over strategy, Fedorov claimed on Thursday.

Fedorov could strongly communicate Ukraine’s strategy and vision of war both internally and externally, with partners and had good relations with private defense producers from his time at the digital transformation ministry, said Mykola Bielieskov, a defense analyst based in Kyiv.

He also used his tech background to introduce an after-action review after Russian attacks, something that helped the Ukrainian air force improve its drone interception rate.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius praised Fedorov, crediting him for Ukraine’s recent success, and Romanian Deputy Defense Minister Sorin Moldovan commended Bucharest’s “good cooperation with Mr. Fedorov.”

“He seemed very effective,” said a senior European defense official, granted anonymity like other individuals in this article to speak freely, describing him as “a digital guy in a mostly mechanical world.”

One NATO diplomat said they were “very surprised” by the dismissal, arguing the move was not a smart decision.

“We loved him; he did great,” the diplomat said. “I did not see this coming.”

Some top Ukrainian military commanders, too, have expressed solidarity with Fedorov, crediting him with the Ukrainian army’s success of the past year. Colonel Pavlo Yelizarov, an architect of a new system that improved Ukrainian air defense performance against killer drones, filed for resignation from his post as a deputy commander of the air force after Fedorov’s ousting. He said : “Fedorov’s dismissal is a very big harm for Ukraine’s defense during wartime.”

Fedorov participates in a press conference in Kyiv on May 11, 2026. | Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP via Getty Images

This is not to say everything Fedorov did was successful. Key reforms that improved pay for frontline troops and made it easier for foreign volunteers and previous draft dodgers to fight for Ukraine fell well short of expectations.

And while the former defense minister admitted the reforms were poorly communicated, he said they were stalled by the army command, like many of his other initiatives.

Houston, we have a problem

Whatever positives emerged from Fedorov’s tenure, experts agree that the conflict between the defense ministry and the army command was a serious problem.

“If the head of the defense ministry starts behaving not as a supplier fulfilling the orders of the general staff, but starts asking questions and getting into strategic management of war, that’s when the conflict appears,” Bielieskov said.

“The military has a very wary attitude towards civilians when it comes to strategic war management — they perceive attempts to be involved in this as a violation of their prerogatives,” he continued. “Therefore, if this problem is not resolved, the tension will remain — only its degree may change.”

It’s perhaps with an eye on healing the rift that Zelenskyy has tapped Khmara, an experienced combat special service officer behind many of Ukraine’s bold long-range drone strikes inside Russia, to replace Fedorov. Yet Khmara can’t be appointed to a defense minister’s post without resigning from service, as it is a role for a civilian.

Khmara also reportedly maintains close ties with many Western intelligence agencies, which could assuage uneasiness among partners currently keeping Ukraine afloat. Nonetheless, the EU, which is set to pour further billions into Ukraine’s defense industry , will now have to wait to see reforms enacted and reorganizations take place under a new minister.

And the war is not standing still.

“People think there is a risk that all the advantages that we have shown recently may simply be lost,” Bielieskov said. “Russia is adapting while we have such changes and uncertainty.”

Full text

Little is known about the tens of thousands of liberated Africans who were buried on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena in the 19th century. But now, a new chemical and dental analysis reveals where more than 150 of these individuals spent their childhoods in Africa.

About 27,000 liberated slaves ended up on St. Helena after the British Empire outlawed slave trading in 1807, with the Royal Navy enforcing the ban. St. Helena was used to drop off enslaved people whom the navy had liberated. However, about 8,000 of these newly liberated people, who were malnourished and in poor health, died on the South Atlantic island not long after landing there.

These burials were forgotten until they were found ahead of an airport construction project centuries later. The dig, carried out in 2007 and 2008, found the buried skeletons of the liberated slaves, according to a new study published Thursday (July 16) in the journal Science .

To determine the origins of the liberated slaves, scientists studied the teeth of 152 individuals, measuring the ratio of strontium isotopes, which are atoms of the element strontium that have a different number of neutrons in their nuclei. When a person's teeth grow during childhood, the strontium isotopes in the food they eat and the water they drink are incorporated into their tooth enamel. By studying the unique strontium ratios in a person's enamel, researchers can determine where individuals lived as children.

The study found that many of the liberated slaves lived near the coast of West Africa, although some lived farther inland.

"Most individuals likely came from coastal or near-coastal regions in western Central Africa, [and] others appear to have originated much farther inland, implying forced displacement over hundreds to thousands of kilometers before embarkation," the team wrote in the study.

In one case, a man who died between the ages of 19 and 25 had been moved from inland Angola to the coast as a child, between the ages of 7 and 9. The scientists detected this movement by comparing the isotope signatures of his teeth that grew when he was around 7 to those that grew when he was around 9. He may have been trafficked as a slave when he was between those ages, the team wrote in their paper.

It's "possible that their displacement during childhood was connected with their enslavement," study co-author Hannes Schroeder , an associate professor of molecular ecology and evolution at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science in an email. Unfortunately, we don't know much else about this individual, Schroeder said.

In addition to this man, the study found evidence that at least 10 of the liberated slaves had been transported as children or early adolescents.

Schroeder said it's not clear if any of the people in the study have living descendants on St. Helena but it's unlikely given that these people probably died not long after landing on the island.

The team also used historical records and DNA analyses of 20 of the individuals to help determine where they were from. The DNA analysis "revealed affinities with present-day populations from Gabon and northern Angola, while also showing considerable diversity," the team wrote.

"These results are consistent with eyewitness accounts by Royal Navy personnel on the island, who reported multiple languages among the captives, including Congo and Benguela dialects," the team wrote, noting that the findings also align with historical records from Angola, Cuba and Brazil.

The reburial ceremony for the liberated slaves on St. Helena, a remote island in the Atlantic. (Image credit: Photo courtesy of the St Helena Museum) "The tragedy of enslaved children"

The new study sheds much needed light on the lives of enslaved people, researchers told Live Science.

"This study is especially impactful because it investigates instances of slavery, where knowledge of individuals' ancestors and descendants have been erased from history," Steven Micheletti , a geneticist who has studied the trans-Atlantic slave trade but was not involved in the new research, told Live Science in an email. However, he said the study would have benefited from analyzing the DNA of more people.

David Head , a historian at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in the study, praised the study. We "know a lot about the embarkation/disembarkation of enslaved people, thanks to slave traders keeping records of their business but less about where people originate from and how they got to the ports," he said in an email. "It's not surprising that the study found most people came from relatively close to the coast but that there were cases of people who came from much farther inland as well."

What "seems most interesting to me is the promise of learning about individuals, which is often very hard to do since the slave traders kept the records," and records kept by slave traders tended not to include a lot of information on the lives of their slaves, Head added.

He was also struck by the study's findings that many of the enslaved people were moved at a young age. "It makes sense that slave traders wanted younger people, with the potential for many years as laborers, but to have [this] reinforced through their [teeth] reveals the tragedy of enslaved children."

Related stories

Enslaved people were kidnapped from all across Africa, rare look at DNA from colonial cemetery reveals

Enslaved Africans led a decade-long rebellion 1,200 years ago in Iraq, new evidence suggests

Plantation slavery was invented on this tiny African island, according to archaeologists

Alex Bentley , an anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee who wrote an article discussing the study in the journal, praised the research, noting how it combined the isotope data with historical records and some DNA analysis.

This is important because "although strontium isotope ratios in human tooth enamel ultimately reflect local geology, they record a biologically available mixture of foods and water consumed while the tooth was forming during childhood," Bentley told Live Science in an email. "So it's rarely a unique geographic fingerprint." It's possible that similar approaches could be used to study the origins of enslaved people in the United States, Bentley added.

The remains were reburied in 2022. The scientists and members of St. Helena's community looked into the possibility of repatriating the remains to countries in Africa where the people came from, but no agreements were reached. In some cases, it would have been difficult to determine which country to return them to, the team noted in their paper.