Aerospace & Defense Despite Moscow’s Missile Blitz, Students Lead Protests Across Ukraine By Kevin Holden Platt ,
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Kevin Holden Platt writes on space defense, SpaceX, ISS, Space War I Follow Author Aug 09, 2026, 11:57pm EDT Aug 09, 2026, 11:59pm EDT --:-- / --:-- This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more . Student-led protests across Ukraine are extraordinary because they are being staged in defiance of the missiles launched by invading Russian forces, even as Moscow threatens to use nuclear weapons against any power aiding Ukraine. (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/GettyImages) AFP via Getty Images Student-spearheaded demonstrations across Ukraine’s major cities and campuses are extraordinary because they are being staged in defiance of the missiles launched by invading Russian forces and their Kremlin commander, says a leading scholar on Russia’s attempt to crush and annex the besieged democracy.
As protests against the dismissal of Ukraine’s young reformist defense minister spread out across its major cities, Moscow has been intensifying its rocket blitzes.
Yet university students have not retreated in the face of these strikes, and are still pressing for Ukraine’s president to reinstate Mykhailo Fedorov, the tech wizard who pushed forward innovations in drone-jet fighters and robotic battlefront soldiers.
Fedorov led Ukraine’s remarkable turnaround in countering the Russian invasion, and in safeguarding Ukraine’s independence and vibrant democratic system, says Peter Dickinson, a leading scholar on the conflict at the Atlantic Council, one of the top defense and diplomacy think tanks in Washington, DC.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has attempted to accommodate the protesters by offering Fedorov an alternative position in the government, Dickinson says.
But in far-off Moscow, he adds, the Russian president has been infuriated by the demonstrations.
Vladimir Putin has viewed people-powered protests as an existential threat to Russia’s and his own future ever since he was stationed in the Soviet puppet state of East Germany as a KGB agent, back in the 1980s, Dickinson told me in an interview.
As prodemocracy protests erupted across the Soviet bloc, Dickinson says, Putin watched in agony as West German and East German youths joined forces to tear down the machine-gun-guarded Berlin Wall.
West German demonstrators tear down a section of the Berlin Wall under the gaze of East German border guards in 1989. (Photo by Colin Campbell/Getty Images) Getty Images At the time, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev broke with decades of Stalinist tradition by refusing to send in Russian tanks and troops to quell the marches that criss-crossed Eastern Europe, and the Soviet satellite states began asserting their independence.
Changing the world and the future, Gorbachev “declared that he would not support Communist regimes in other countries if their peoples were opposed to them,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated on awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize a year after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. “He thus started a chain reaction which led to the fall of communism in Europe .”
Then, the entire Soviet Union disintegrated, with all 15 republics breaking away, but in a peaceful process that Gorbachev hoped would lead to the creation of new democracies across Europe and Asia.
Yet since Putin gained p…