If there is one group of people happy to have artificial intelligence take their jobs, it is Ukrainian soldiers.

Two of them, on a break in a Kyiv coffee shop, asked to have their picture taken with the man trying to take them off the front, the recently fired Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.

The soldiers smiled and gave a thumbs-up for the camera — as though Mr. Fedorov were not at the center of a government schism that rocked Ukraine last month, exposing fractures in its highest circles even as the war tilted in the country’s favor.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Fedorov, 35, touched on both the revolution he sees on the battlefield and his own future in Ukrainian politics, in which his status as the zealot of robot war has made him a star.

“I am absolutely convinced that robots and drones should be doing the fighting wherever possible,” he said. “That is how we preserve the lives of our soldiers.” In his view, only armies equipped with cheap, smart and mass-produced weapons will survive in a new era of warfare.

During his six months as minister of defense, Mr. Fedorov promoted that philosophy, helping turn the tide in the war against Russia, and in turn causing his own popularity to soar.

But his approach led to clashes with establishment figures in the military and weapons industry. President Volodymyr Zelensky first fired Mr. Fedorov and then, after protests, the top general who had feuded with him.

Mistrust ran so high, Mr. Fedorov acknowledged, that to root out ministry officials with secret ties to defense contractors he administered lie-detector tests, resulting in a shake-up that made enemies.

There were also political reasons for the firing, according to Ukrainian analysts, who point to the risk Mr. Fedorov could pose to Mr. Zelensky in future elections. His dismissal drew street protests and vocal dissent from part of the army, they note, which raised the prospect of a fission into two power centers: the president and the ex-defense minister.

In the interview, Mr. Fedorov said he would not go into political opposition against Mr. Zelensky during the war, and would not meet on the street with the demonstrators who support his reinstatement as defense minister. But he said he would not return to Mr. Zelensky’s government, either, unless restored as minister of defense.

“I don’t want this situation to artificially drag me into politics,” said Mr. Fedorov, who spent seven years in Mr. Zelensky’s government, starting as minister for digital affairs. He added that he did not see it “as a political fight,” and declined to discuss private conversations with the president or Mr. Zelensky’s reasons for the firing.

He did say, though, that lobbyists for defense contractors had actively agitated for his dismissal. That arose from a fight over war strategy with some generals and bureaucrats that also was over “corruption,” he said.

Now, he said, he wanted the tug of war between protesters and the president to focus not on his own job, but on strategy in the war.

Sipping coffee on a crystalline summer morning in central Kyiv, Mr. Fedorov described that debate between the old guard and new, and its implications for the military’s future.

War, he said, was heading toward “the robotization of the front line” and remote piloting of drones that would remove soldiers from danger. A next stage would be autonomous systems attacking targets, evolving then into “autonomous drones fighting autonomous drones powered by artificial intelligence.”

Mr. Fedorov said his dismissal could slow but would not halt the overhaul of military planning and weapons procurement, calling it too far along to reverse.

Ukrainian drones now inflict about 95 percent of casualties on Russian soldiers along the front, according to Mr. Fedorov, far outperforming snipers, howitzers, tanks and all other conventional weapons combined.

And Ukraine is still experimenting with new tools. On his phone, Mr. Fedorov showed a video of an improbable-looking, self-balancing robotic unicycle armed with a gun. In the video, the device bounced over potholes and an irrigation ditch at tremendous speed, like an evil Segway scooter.

His critiques of infantry assault tactics, he said, were not aimed at the soldiers conducting them. “Ukrainians are the bravest in the world. That is why we need to preserve these brave people.”

Support for Mr. Fedorov is not unanimous within the military, and some have called him and his team out of touch with the brutal realities of trench fighting. Seasoned generals have called his ideas fanciful or naïve, and when one of Mr. Fedorov’s aides criticized an assault unit for its losses of infantry troops and armored vehicles, the unit suggested the aide should try an assault himself if he knew better.

Other service members have voiced their support. At least one air force officer resigned to protest Mr. Fedorov’s firing, and in interviews in recent weeks, a half a dozen rank-and-file soldiers unequivocally backed his push for technical innovations to reduce the number of people at the front.

As minister, Mr. Fedorov shifted procurement budgets to match his priorities, he said: Outlays on drones and other technological weapons rose to 90 percent of the military’s weapons procurement budget from 60 percent. He also promoted a program allowing soldiers to buy their own weapons from an Amazon-like website, which proved popular in the army but left the traditional lobbying-based business model of defense contracting out of the loop.

He declined to name specific contractors who had lost business and lobbied for his ouster, other than to single out suppliers of short-range, 155-millimeter artillery shells, and a European country that wanted to fund a $230 million contract for tank repairs, apparently to funnel business to preferred companies. He declined to name the country.

The shells are a staple of most NATO arsenals but no longer needed in Ukraine, he argued, now that the battlefield had transformed from two lines of trenches into something new. Analysts now describe the front as overlapping zones of denied access: a zone where either army can kill anyone, on foot or in a vehicle, with exploding drones.

This kill zone, as many soldiers call it, is wider than the 18-mile or so range of standard 155-millimeter shells and the effective range of tank cannons. The contracts, Mr. Fedorov said, were fat to be trimmed from a drone-centered strategy.

If he moves to the private sector, Mr. Fedorov said, he would choose a company working on a promising new military technology such as lasers, humanoid combat robots, dirt-cheap missiles or an A.I. weapon that was being tested in Ukraine.

That weapon, a drone that autonomously chooses targets with no radio connection to a pilot, has been tested in strikes in Russian-occupied Crimea, he said, but has not been mass produced.

Regardless of whether he returns to the Ukrainian government, Mr. Fedorov said he would keep advocating for the deployment of robotic systems in combat. Most frontline infantry can be replaced with sensors, machine guns on auto-turrets and drones, he said.

His push to remove humans from weaponry use is at odds with the Red Cross and other groups that support a human role in interpreting the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war that govern who can lawfully be killed in combat.

But his position has proved popular in Ukraine. In a survey this month by Rating Group, a Ukrainian research institution, 72 percent of Ukrainians polled said they opposed the firing of Mr. Fedorov. Another protest in central Kyiv is planned for Friday. Drawing a significant crowd would signal an escalation in this month’s street politics.

Mr. Fedorov said he would not join the demonstrators, but would also not discourage them from openly criticizing the government — a break from the general wartime status quo, in which officials have called for national unity above all.

Instead, he called the protests a positive sign, saying they showed “the Russians didn’t take our democracy hostage during the war.”

Yurii Shyvala, Evelina Riabenko and Natalia Novosolova contributed reporting from Lviv and Kyiv, Ukraine.